Florentina Holzinger Turns Water Into Theatre at the Venice Biennale

In May 2026, Austrian choreographer and performance artist Florentina Holzinger will represent her country at the Venice Biennale with SEAWORLD VENICE, a radical new commission that transforms the Austrian Pavilion into a living, breathing ecosystem of performance, ritual and resistance.

Opening on 6 May and running until 22 November 2026, the project places water at its core. Not as a decorative motif, but as a political, physical and emotional force. Set within the fragile landscape of Venice, a city shaped by rising seas and human intervention, Holzinger’s work explores what it means to inhabit bodies and systems under pressure.

A Pavilion Reimagined

Conceived as part underwater theme park, part sewage plant and part sacred space, SEAWORLD VENICE transforms the Austrian Pavilion into a machinic organism inhabited by performers throughout the Biennale. Live installations and durational performances unfold daily, blurring the boundaries between spectacle, labour and endurance.

Holzinger’s performers operate within shifting water systems, mechanical structures and immersive environments, creating scenes that oscillate between beauty and unease. The result is a space where audiences are not passive observers, but witnesses to bodies negotiating survival within collapsing ecological frameworks.

The Body as Political Terrain

Known for combining extreme physicality with theatrical precision, Holzinger works across dance, opera, theatre and performance art to examine power at the level of the body. Her practice challenges traditional hierarchies of “high” and “popular” culture, merging classical references with countercultural energy.

In SEAWORLD VENICE, water becomes both subject and agent. It flows, surrounds, restricts and transforms. It mirrors the cycles of consumption, waste and regeneration that define contemporary life. Through this elemental lens, Holzinger exposes how bodies are shaped by economic systems, environmental crisis and technological mediation.

Curator Nora-Swantje Almes describes the project as “an apocalyptic scenario that is already here,” one that reveals humanity’s complicity in ecological collapse while radically expanding what performance can be.

Études Across the City

The project extends far beyond the Giardini. Throughout the Biennale, Holzinger will stage site-specific performances titled Études in public and transitional spaces across Venice and its lagoon. Developed since 2020, these choreographic interventions insert the body into everyday urban flows, turning streets, waterways and thresholds into temporary stages.

From submerged spaces to elevated viewpoints, the performers trace Venice’s vertical and horizontal extremes, revealing how tourism, infrastructure and climate vulnerability intersect.

The opening Étude will take place on the morning of 6 May 2026, setting the tone for a commission that evolves over time rather than remaining fixed.

Art in an Age of Rising Tides

Water in SEAWORLD VENICE is never neutral. It is life-giving and destructive, sacred and polluted, intimate and industrial. Holzinger uses it to explore how human systems manage, exploit and mythologise natural resources.

Her work reflects a wider anxiety about climate change, waste economies and bodily autonomy. Yet it avoids didacticism. Instead, it relies on visceral imagery, endurance-based action and poetic disruption to provoke emotional and intellectual response.

As Holzinger notes, Venice’s precarious relationship with water makes it the ideal setting for this investigation. Here, nature and technology are inseparable, and survival depends on constant negotiation.

A Major Publication

Coinciding with the pavilion project, Berlin-based Bierke Verlag will release HOLZINGER, the artist’s first major monograph. Produced in collaboration with Gropius Bau and Kunsthalle Wien, the publication brings together essays, visual documentation and an in-depth interview, positioning Holzinger as one of Europe’s most influential contemporary performance artists.

Contributors include leading voices in art criticism and curatorial practice, reflecting the growing international significance of her work.

A Defining Moment

With SEAWORLD VENICE, Florentina Holzinger delivers one of the most ambitious Austrian pavilion projects in recent years. Part installation, part endurance experiment and part ecological allegory, the work turns the pavilion into a living archive of vulnerability and resilience.

In a city defined by water and uncertainty, Holzinger offers not solutions, but a powerful sensory language for confronting the realities of our time. It is performance as warning, ritual and possibility all at once.