Florentina Holzinger’s Venice Biennale Performance Is Set for Berlin, Vienna, and Brooklyn
Florentina Holzinger’s Venice Biennale project, Seaworld Venice, is headed for a new life across three cities. An adapted version of the work, first created for the Austrian Pavilion, will be presented at Gropius Bau in Berlin in spring 2027, then at Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna that fall, before concluding at Amant in Brooklyn in March 2028.
Nora-Swantje Almes, curator for live programs and outreach at Gropius Bau, who organized the Venice presentation, will oversee the new iteration. At Amant, the Brooklyn presentation is expected to occupy three of the institution’s four exhibition spaces, along with its outdoor lot at 316 Ten Eyck Street in East Williamsburg, with intermittent performances.
The Venice version became one of the Biennale’s most talked-about works for its physical intensity and its uneasy environmental charge. Holzinger hung upside down inside a large bronze bell recovered from the Venetian lagoon and suspended above the pavilion, striking it as a human clapper. Nearby, nude collaborators floated in a dunk tank flanked by port-a-potties, while visitors were invited to use the setup. Elsewhere, a jet ski driven by a naked woman cut through floodwater as a rotating structure carried more performers through the air.
The work’s reference point was Kevin Costner’s 1995 film Waterworld, but its warning was more immediate than cinematic. Holzinger framed spectacle as a last language for an era of ecological collapse, and Venice itself offered the backdrop: days of heavy rain had already pushed polluted lagoon water against the city’s edges.
Holzinger has remained active since the Biennale opened. She recently premiered Pfingstspiel (Pentecost Play) at Hermann Nitsch’s castle in Prinzendorf an der Zaya, near Vienna, in collaboration with the Wiener Festwochen and the Nitsch Foundation. The nine-hour performance extended the same appetite for scale, risk, and bodily extremity that has made her work so difficult to ignore.
In a recent reflection on Viennese Actionism, Holzinger described the movement’s graphic force as a response to silence, and said she sees art as a tool against what she cannot accept. That conviction now travels with Seaworld Venice as it moves from the lagoon to Berlin, Vienna, and New York.
