Florentina Holzinger to Represent Austria at Venice Biennale
167Jan. 14, 2025
Vienna-born choreographer and performance artistFlorentina Holzingerhas been chosen to represent Austria at the Sixty-FirstVenice Biennale, set to open in April 2026. Her Austrian pavilion exhibition is to be curated by Nora-Swantje Almes, curator of the live program and outreach at Berlin’s Gropius Bau. Tentatively titled “Seaworld Venice,” the show will draw on Venice’s relationship with the sea and will feature aquatic-themed installations and performances.
Influenced by the Viennese Actionists as well as by bodybuilding and body art, Holzinger is renowned for unabashedly feminist works subverting traditional forms such as opera and ballet via the use of such unexpected tropes as blood, needles, and nudity. Among her well-known works areApollon, 2020, a takeoff of George Balanchine’s 1928Apolloincorporating defecation and coprophagia; “Études,” an ongoing series of public performances focusing on the creation of sound through the body as instrument; andOphelia’s Got Talent, 2022, which examines misogyny by pitting the titular Shakespearian character and mythological female characters including mermaids and sirens against one another in an unsettling talent show. This past October, eighteen theatergoers in Stuttgart, Germany, weretreated for nauseaafter attending performances of herSancta, a reimagining of Paul Hindemith’s 1920s operaSancta Susannafeaturing roller-skating naked nuns, live piercing, actual sexual intercourse, and lots of blood, both fake and real.
“This opportunity presents an exciting and entirely new challenge for my team and me,” said Holzinger in a statement. “Whether on stage, in galleries, or in public spaces, the essence of my work lies in the uncompromising use of the body as a medium. . . . 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.”