Florentina Holzinger at Venice: Bodies, Water, and the Politics of Exposure

When Florentina Holzinger represents Austria at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in 2026, she will do so not with an exhibition in the conventional sense, but with a living system. SEAWORLD VENICE, curated by Nora-Swantje Almes, transforms the Austrian Pavilion into a hybrid environment: part underwater theme park, part sewage facility, part sacred architecture. It is a space where bodies are tested, systems are exposed, and spectators are implicated.

Holzinger’s work has long occupied the fault line between discipline and excess. Drawing from dance, theatre, opera, and endurance performance, she stages encounters in which physical extremity becomes a political language. Her performers do not represent vulnerability; they enact it. Through exhaustion, risk, and spectacle, she renders power visible at the level of flesh.

Water, the central material and metaphor of SEAWORLD VENICE, has been a recurring presence in her practice. Here, it becomes both environment and agent. It is presented as life-sustaining substance, waste product, controlled resource, and theatrical medium. In Venice, a city defined by its precarious relationship with rising tides and environmental fragility, water is never neutral. Holzinger’s installation positions it as infrastructure, commodity, and existential threat simultaneously.

The pavilion is conceived as a machinic organism, inhabited by performers throughout the Biennale’s duration. Bodies circulate within systems of filtration, immersion, discharge, and purification. The architecture functions not as backdrop, but as collaborator. Movement, labour, and exposure become continuous processes rather than isolated performances.

This approach reflects Holzinger’s broader interest in how institutions manage bodies, whether through cultural hierarchies, medical frameworks, or technological systems. Her work consistently interrogates who is protected, who is disciplined, and who is made visible. By blending “high” cultural references with pop imagery and subcultural aesthetics, she destabilises traditional distinctions between refinement and excess, control and collapse.

As curator Nora-Swantje Almes observes, the work articulates “an apocalyptic scenario that is already here.” Rather than projecting catastrophe into the future, Holzinger insists that ecological and social breakdown is already embedded in daily life, in consumption patterns, waste cycles, and bodily routines. The audience does not witness crisis from a distance. They enter its infrastructure.

Extending beyond the Giardini, SEAWORLD VENICE unfolds through a series of public performances titled Études, developed by the artist since 2020. These choreographic interventions activate transitional and overlooked spaces across the city. Streets, waterways, and transient zones become temporary stages, dissolving the boundary between exhibition and urban life.

This dispersal is crucial. It resists the containment of radical practice within institutional walls. Instead, it mirrors the way environmental and technological systems permeate everyday existence. The work migrates, mutates, and adapts, refusing to settle into a singular form.

Holzinger’s engagement with Venice is therefore not symbolic but structural. The city’s vulnerability, its dependence on tourism, and its ecological precarity are embedded in the logic of the project. Rising from the lagoon and ascending into public space, her performers embody both resilience and exposure, resilience without illusion.

Alongside the pavilion project, Berlin-based Bierke Verlag will publish HOLZINGER, the artist’s first major monograph, produced in collaboration with Gropius Bau and Kunsthalle Wien. With contributions from critics and artists including Claire Bishop and Mire Lee, the publication situates her work within contemporary debates on embodiment, power, and institutional critique.

What distinguishes SEAWORLD VENICE is not its scale or spectacle, but its insistence on consequence. The installation does not aestheticise collapse. It operationalises it. It shows how bodies survive inside systems that are failing, how beauty and damage coexist, and how spectatorship itself becomes a form of participation.

At a time when environmental discourse is often abstracted into data and policy, Holzinger returns it to sensation. Weight, breath, resistance, fatigue. Her work insists that crisis is not only something we analyse, but something we inhabit.

In Venice, that insistence becomes unavoidable. SEAWORLD VENICE is not a representation of water, ecology, or technology. It is a working model of their entanglement. And within it, the human body remains both medium and measure.