JSC Research Center

The Julia Stoschek Collection (JSC) is one of the largest private collections of time-based media art in the world. In October 2021 the JSC Research Center will be inaugurated at the Düsseldorf headquarters. The Research Center and library provide access to the entire holdings of the collection. In the future, JSC Düsseldorf’s focus on research and education will be augmented by new cooperative ventures with partners in the areas of art and science, fellowships awarded to students, and workshops focusing on time-based media art.

The collector Julia Stoschek explains, “Our goal is to consistently contribute to making this art form more democratic by opening the collection to an even broader audience and establishing our Düsseldorf location as an international center for time-based media art.”

Around thirty-five percent of the 890 works by three hundred artists are currently available to the public at the collection locations in Düsseldorf and Berlin as well as online on the JSC Video Lounge. Starting in mid-October 2021, visitors will be able to view the complete holdings of the collection on a computer in the JSC Research Center, including all works that are not on public display. The spectrum ranges from works of the 1960s by artists such as Bruce Nauman, Carolee Schneemann, Jack Smith, and VALIE EXPORT to contemporary works by Arthur Jafa, Anne Imhof, and Kandis Williams.

The reference library contains over four thousand publications on art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The holdings include important source material for research such as crucial art-theoretical publications on philosophy and aesthetics. These are augmented by handbooks, exhibition catalogues, monographs, specialized and theoretical texts, and lexica with a focus on time-based art and media, photography, the art market, exhibition practice, and archiving practices for time-based artifacts in the context of museums and collections.

International cooperation and fellowships
The new Research Center will enable the Julia Stoschek Collection to engage in new cooperative ventures with academic and scholarly partners. The Curatorial & Research Residency Program gives young curators the opportunity to conduct research and work at JSC Düsseldorf. For the residency program, the Julia Stoschek Collection is collaborating for the second time with the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and starting this year it will collaborate for the first time with the Curatorial Studies program of Goethe-Universität and the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main.

A new cooperation with Kunstakademie Düsseldorf beginning in fall 2021 will enable a close exchange between the two institutions. Individual classes will have the opportunity to use the exhibition program and the cinema of JSC Düsseldorf for their own research purposes. Joint lectures and workshops focusing on time-based media art are planned.

The JSC Research Center was supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.