Choreographer and performer Florentina Holzinger will representAustria at the 61st Venice Biennale with the interdisciplinary project SEAWORLD VENICE, curated by Nora-Swantje Almes (Gropius Bau, Berlin). The project will consist of apermanent live installationin the Austrian Pavilion and a series of site-specific Études spread across Venice and its lagoon.
Known for work that questions artistic genres and socio-political conventions, Holzinger has for years been developing research onwater, understood both as a physical element and as a symbol. In this project, the artist explores the human body within an ever-changing environment, where nature and technology intertwine in increasingly complex ways. Moving between dance, theater, opera and performance, Holzinger combines strong physicality with rigorous stage construction. His works fuse languages of “high” culture with pop and countercultural influences, challenging the boundaries between entertainment and radical critique. The body thus becomes the site of tensions, resistance and extremes, making tangible dynamics of power and transformation.
SEAWORLD VENICE stems from this research and is configured as awork in direct dialogue with Venice, a city deeply marked by its relationship with water, its fragility and the consequences of human intervention. Water is evoked in multiple forms: as a vital resource, as a cyclical element of the human body, as an environment to be traversed and as a controlled system. The project is conceived as an underwater theme park, a sewage treatment plant, and a sacred building: a mechanical organism inhabited by perfomers for the duration of the Biennale Arte 2026
Through powerful and often disturbing images, Holzinger constructs a narrative intended to highlight the vulnerability of bodies and the systems in which they move, suggesting an almost apocalyptic scenario that reflects a crisis already underway. “Florentina Holzinger,” the curator explains, “paints an apocalyptic scenario that is already present, illustrating humanity’s complicity in a collapsing (eco)system: lives lived among the rubble of others. Fleeting images and compositions that haunt us, bordering on the impossible. It radically expands what is considered possible: a contagious mindset we need now more than ever.”
SEAWORLD VENICE will extend beyond the Austrian Pavilion through Études, a series of performances developed since 2020 consisting of choreographic exercises and performance actions staged in public and transitional spaces. In this way, the intervention is configured as an open and evolving process, capable of adapting to different places and situations. From the depths of the Venetian lagoon, also symbolically linked to the effects of mass tourism, to the urban space of the city, the performers, human and non-human, embody a reflection on the fragility and resilience of the contemporary world. As Holzinger herself states, “In Venice, a city trapped in a deep and precarious relationship with water, my abiding interest in this element will take on new dimensions. Here, the body will play a central role in exploring the interdependence and interaction between nature and technology.”
To mark the project, the Berlin-based publishing house Bierke Verlag will publish HOLZINGER, the first monograph devoted to the artist, produced in collaboration with Gropius Bau and Kunsthalle Wien. The volume will gather critical contributions and insights into his artistic practice, including texts by Claire Bishop, Caroline Lillian Schopp, Mire Lee and Anna Leon, as well as an introduction by the curator and an interview with the artist.
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| Venice Biennale, Austria focuses on the performance actions of Florentina Holzinger |
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