Florentina Holzinger Will Turn the Austrian Pavilion Into a Water-Filled Sewage System at the Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is known for national pavilions that aim for scale, symbolism, and a certain degree of spectacle. Austria’s contribution this year may be the one most likely to unsettle all three expectations at once. The Austrian artist Florentina Holzinger (b. 1986), whose performances have made her a force in theater and dance, will represent Austria with “Seaworld Venice,” opening May 9, 2026 in the Giardini.
Holzinger’s practice is built around physical extremity. Her work has long incorporated nudity, sexuality, flesh hooks, stunt artistry, live tattooing, bodily fluids, and heavy machinery, often in ways that leave audiences divided and performers under intense strain. That uncompromising approach is now being scaled up for one of the art world’s most visible stages.
“Seaworld Venice” will fill the Austrian Pavilion with water and transform it into something between an underwater theme park and a fully functional sewage treatment plant. The installation is not simply theatrical. It is designed to make the audience part of the system. Visitors will be able to use onsite portable toilets, and their fluids will be cleaned and cycled back into the tanks.
The project’s concerns extend beyond bodily spectacle. Holzinger’s pavilion links the human body to ecology, and ecology to Venice itself. The city, built on water it cannot drink, is also a place under pressure from sinking ground and mass tourism. In that sense, the work uses the pavilion’s infrastructure to mirror the city’s own precarious condition.
For Holzinger, the move from theater into the art world does not appear to mean a softening of method. If anything, the Biennale offers a larger frame for the same kind of confrontation her work has always pursued: between flesh and system, performance and institution, discomfort and attention. In Venice, those tensions are likely to be impossible to ignore.
