Florentina Holzinger presents SEAWORLD VENICE during La Biennale di Venezia 2026
Florentina Holzinger’s SEAWORLD VENICE transforms Austria’s National Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia into a live installation, performance environment and unstable water system. Presented at the 61st International Art Exhibition from May 9 to November 22, 2026, the project is curated by Nora-Swantje Almes and situates the Austrian choreographer and performance artist inside Venice’s fraught relationship with water, tourism, infrastructure and survival.
Known for works that move across dance, theatre, opera and performance, Florentina Holzinger approaches the pavilion as a site where bodies, machines and ecological systems are forced into direct contact. SEAWORLD VENICE is described through overlapping references: a sacred building, an underwater theme park and a sewage treatment plant. These images are not decorative metaphors, but structural conditions for a commission in which bodily fluids, live performers, mechanical devices and rising water form a continuously changing organism.
The installation turns the pavilion into a flooded environment where action and consequence remain visible. Visitors’ bodily fluids contribute to the system, becoming part of the living conditions for performers inhabiting the space while also feeding the pavilion’s transformation. Through this closed-loop logic, Holzinger connects the language of purification, waste and ritual to wider systems of power. Cleanliness and impurity are treated not as opposites, but as social and religious constructions used to produce order, exclusion and control.
Several elements inside SEAWORLD VENICE sharpen this confrontation between spectacle and collapse. A jet ski circulates through the flooded pavilion as a monument to turbo-tourism and ecological damage, pointing to the pressure placed on Venice by mass consumption and environmental fragility. A monumental weather vane pierces the architecture, replacing fixed patriarchal symbols with a rotating female-led “Deposition of Christ.” At the back of the pavilion, robot dogs move through rising water behind glass, operating as mechanical watchdogs around a central aquarium flanked by toilets.
The courtyard extends the work’s most visceral proposition. A performer lives inside a water tank sustained by visitors’ urine, continuously inhabiting the Austrian Pavilion throughout the Biennale. Florentina Holzinger positions this body against the inherited image of the reclining female nude, particularly Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, painted in Venice in 1510. In this context, the figure is no longer an idealised muse or passive object of beauty, but a survivor inside the waste produced by systems of privilege, extraction and spectacle.
SEAWORLD VENICE also unfolds beyond the pavilion through site-specific Études, an ongoing body of performative actions that Florentina Holzinger has developed since 2020. In Venice, these Études mark the opening and closing moments of the project, beginning with an inaugural ritual in which a bell is recovered from the lagoon and brought to the pavilion in procession. Activated hourly by the embodied persistence of a female performer, the bell becomes a call, a warning and a critique of exhausted religious and patriarchal structures.
Responding to the Biennale’s theme, In Minor Keys, Florentina Holzinger uses the abject to challenge polished narratives of progress. The pavilion becomes a porous system in constant transformation, where water functions as material, mirror and threat. Co-commissioned Études will continue across different locations, while adapted versions of SEAWORLD VENICE are scheduled for Gropius Bau in Berlin, Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna and Amant in Brooklyn. At the Austrian Pavilion, Holzinger presents Venice not as romantic scenery, but as a living test site for bodies, machines and collapsing orders.
All Images Credits: SEAWORLD VENICE by Florentina Holzinger for the Austrian Pavilion, Biennale Arte 2026. Photography by Nicole Marianna Wytyczak
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