Florentina Holzinger
61st Biennale di Venezia, Italy
9 May - 22 November 2026
The Austrian choreographer and performance artist Florentina Holzinger represents Austria at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia with SEAWORLD VENICE, a bold new interdisciplinary commission curated by Nora-Swantje Almes. Known for her genre-defying work that challenges socio-political conventions, Holzinger conceptualises the Austrian Pavilion as, at once, a sacred building, underwater theme park and sewage treatment plant. Visitors’ bodily fluids are turned into living quarters for performers inhabiting the Austrian Pavilion, while also actively contributing to the pavilion’s flooding. Holzinger’s work takes the form of a machinic organism in which action and its consequences are continuously negotiated, exploring the body within a radically changing landscape where nature and technology collide. On view from May 9 – November 22, 2026, the project features a permanent live installation at the Austrian Pavilion, alongside site-specific Études – an ongoing body of work the artist has been developing since 2020, consisting of performative actions in public space. The Études mark the opening and closing moments of SEAWORLD VENICE. Florentina Holzinger combines extreme physicality with theatrical precision to probe the limits of corporeal agency. Working across dance, performance, opera, and theatre, and critically engaging with their histories, the artist blends legitimised “high” culture with pop and countercultural currents to unsettle the lines between spectacle and subversion. Her works experiment with endurance and moments of extremity to make power legible at the level of the body.
SEAWORLD VENICE derives from this ongoing enquiry, entering into dialogue with Venice, a city defined by its entanglement with water, survival, and the consequences of human intervention. Water, levels rising; water that we drink and excrete in countless cycles every day; water, vital, life-sustaining natural resource and highly managed commodity; water, to plunge in, dive in, and emerge from, transformed. In SEAWORLD VENICE, Holzinger explores concepts of purity and impurity, cleanliness and dirt, which are integral both to the water world and to societal and religious belief systems. Purification cycles and rituals are deemed necessary to restore order. Here, the artist makes these visible and proposes that order itself is unstable. The Opening Étude serves as an inaugural ritual. Recovered from the lagoon and brought to the Pavilion in a procession, a bell opens the Austrian Pavilion and towers over its entrance: a signifier of the sacred, a marker of the passing of time, a call to gather, a warning. The rhythmic, embodied persistence of a female* performer replacing the clapper, rings out the exhausted structures of patriarchal history and religious authority every hour. In the flooded pavilion, a jet ski makes its rounds as a monument to the ecological catastrophe driven by turbo-tourism, which continues to collide with a sinking city. At times, the jet ski’s stillness transforms into swirls and waves – an absurd image of confined nature and of mankind’s desire to control it, a play on Holzinger’s ongoing investigation of the body-machine relationality. Opposite, a monumental weather vane pierces the architecture. Historically used to predict the weather and often adorned with mythological figures in ancient times, weather vanes were installed on churches from the ninth century onward before being replaced by modern meteorological technologies. Here, it substitutes the fixed monuments of the past with a rotating, female-led “Deposition of Christ”. This symbol of a holy descent transforms into a revolving monument of collective strength. As the figures spin in the shifting winds, the work proposes a radical departure from the status quo, foreshadowing a defiant direction for a society in flux.
At the back of the pavilion, the promise of progress continues to unfold as a “Frankensteinesque” dystopia: robot dogs move through rising water behind glass, acting as mechanical watchdogs for a central sacrificial altar: a large aquarium flanked by toilets. In the courtyard, a performer lives inside a water tank sustained by visitors’ urine, inhabiting the Austrian Pavilion continuously throughout the Biennale. This closed-loop recycling system serves as a visceral reflection of a global order in which vulnerable populations and entire nations are relegated to the waste of the powerful. Living in this reservoir, the performer strips away the inherited romanticism of Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (1510) – art history’s first known reclining nude, painted in Venice. She is no longer a silent muse resting on velvet, but a survivor staring out from the wreckage of a civilisation dissolved in urine. In a city where mass tourism collides with ecological fragility, the idea of “beauty” in Venice cannot be separated from the waste it produces.
Alongside its presentation at the Giardini della Biennale, SEAWORLD VENICE features a series of performances titled Études, through which the project becomes an open-ended exploration that evolves across multiple formats and locations. The Études series will continue as satellite projects building narratives across different geographies, and will be presented at the Vienna Festival, the Nitsch Foundation, Kunsthaus Bregenz, TRANSART – Festival for Contemporary Cultures in Bolzano, and Hartwig Art Foundation in Amsterdam.
SEAWORLD VENICE will be presented in adapted versions at Gropius Bau, Berlin (March 2027) and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (June 2027) and Amant, Brooklyn, New York (spring 2028).
This is Florentina Holzinger’s second collaboration with Phileas, following her project at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway in 2024.
