Florentina Holzinger’s Venice Biennale work turns ecological collapse into theater of the body
At this year’s Venice Biennale, Austrian performance artist and choreographer Florentina Holzinger staged a vision of environmental ruin that was as physically punishing as it was theatrical. An underwater amusement park, a circling jet ski, and a performer living inside a reconstructed sewer treatment plant all pointed toward a future shaped by turbo-tourism, excess, and contamination. Elsewhere, performers climbed an enormous weathervane as a gesture toward collective action.
The Venice project was among the most discussed pavilions of the Biennale, in part because Holzinger refuses the distance that often separates spectacle from risk. Her work has long relied on motorbikes, helicopters, heavy machinery, nudity, and endurance-based actions that test what a body can absorb and still remain legible as performance. That same logic carried into the Venice presentation, where shock was not an end in itself but a way of making viewers confront the material consequences of violence, extraction, and spectacle.
On May 23, Holzinger extended that language in a separate 9-hour, one-time performance titled “Pfingstspiel” (Pentecost Play), presented at Hermann Nitsch’s castle in Prinzendorf an der Zaya, near Vienna. The work was created with the Wiener Festwochen arts festival and the Nitsch Foundation, and it functioned as a companion to the Venice project rather than a departure from it.
The setting carried its own historical charge. Nitsch, who died in 2022, is widely associated with Viennese Actionism, the radical 1960s performance movement known for its confrontational use of the body, noise, and transgression. Holzinger has said she relates to that legacy, describing art as a tool to push back against what she cannot accept. In that sense, her work sits in a lineage that treats performance not as illustration, but as pressure — a way to make social and political violence visible through the body itself.
Her recent representation by Thaddaeus Ropac signals how fully that uncompromising practice has entered the gallery world, even as the work continues to resist easy containment. Holzinger’s performances do not soften their own extremity. They use it to ask what kinds of violence audiences have learned to tolerate, and what it means when women stage control over their own bodies in public, on their own terms.
