2026
Austrian performance artist Florentina Holzinger designs the Austrian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Art Biennale
The Austrian choreographer and performance artist Florentina Holzinger will represent Austria at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia with SEAWORLD VENICE, a bold new interdisciplinary commission, curated by Nora-Swantje Almes (Gropius Bau, Berlin). Known for her genre-defying work that challenges socio-political conventions, Holzinger uses her long-standing research into the element of water—as both subject and symbol—to explore the human body in a radically changing landscape, in which nature and technology collide.
On view from 9 May–22 November 2026, the project will feature a permanent live installation and performances at the Austrian Pavilion, alongside site-specific Études across Venice and its lagoon.
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. Elemental forces, such as water and bodily fluids, recur as material presence in her work and are used as agents that act upon bodies while implicating the audiences who witness them.
SEAWORLD VENICE derives from this ongoing enquiry as a new work that enters 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, a vital, life-sustaining natural resource and highly managed commodity; water, to plunge in, dive in, and emerge from, perhaps transformed:
SEAWORLD VENICE is conceived as an underwater theme park, sewage treatment plant, and sacred building—a machinic organism inhabited by performers for the duration of Biennale Arte 2026. Through poetic yet unflinching imagery, Holzinger flirts with the limitations of humanity, revealing the vulnerability of human bodies and the systems they navigate. ‘Florentina Holzinger paints an apocalyptic scenario that is already here, illustrating humankind’s complicity in a collapsing (eco)system: lives lived in the waste of others. Fleeting images and compositions that haunt us, edging the impossible. She radically expands what is considered possible—a mindset that is contagious and that we need right now more than ever,’ says curator Nora-Swantje Almes.
SEAWORLD VENICE will unfold beyond the Giardini della Biennale and across the city through performances titled Études—a body of work the artist has been developing since 2020, consisting of choreographic exercises and performative actions staged in public, transitory spaces. In doing so, the commission becomes an open-ended exploration that evolves across multiple formats and locations. Rising from the depths of the Venetian lagoon, where turbo-tourism’s waste lies at rest, and ascending into the city’s skies, Holzinger’s performers—human and otherwise— reveal the vulnerability and resilience of bodies and the world alike. The artist states, ‘In Venice—a city caught in a profound and precarious relationship with water—my ongoing fascination with this element will take on new dimensions. Here, the body will play a central role in exploring the interdependence and interplay between nature and technology.’
On the occasion of Florentina Holzinger’s project at the Austrian Pavilion, Bierke Verlag, Berlin, will release HOLZINGER—her first major publication—in collaboration with Gropius Bau Berlin and Kunsthalle Wien. The monographic work will bring together perspectives on her artistic practice, visual and choreographic vocabulary, and central themes, and includes texts by Claire Bishop, Caroline Lillian Schopp, Mire Lee, and Anna Leon, alongside an introduction by curator Nora-Swantje Almes and an interview with Florentina Holzinger.
Further Information:
Preview Days: 6–8 May 2026
Pavilion Opening: 6 May 2026
https://www.bmwkms.gv.at/themen/aktuell/biennale-eroeffnung-2026.html
www.seaworldvenice.at
www.bmwkms.gv.at/en/biennale/art-biennale.html
Press Release: www.seaworldvenice.at/press
Biennale Arte 2026
In Minor Keys
Curator: Koyo Kouoh
Exhibiton: 9 May - 22 November 2026 (Preview 6, 7, 8 May 2026)
www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026