Florentina Holzinger

An acclaimed multidisciplinary artist, Florentina Holzinger is radically reshaping the contemporary artistic landscape with a practice that combines extreme physicality with theatrical precision to probe the limits of corporeal agency. Trained in choreography, Holzinger moved early from dance towards producing works encompassing theatre, opera and the visual arts. She deliberately operates across and between established artistic categories while critically engaging with their histories, and blends legitimised ‘high’ culture with pop and countercultural currents to unsettle the line between spectacle and subversion.

Working with her own body or predominantly female-identifying casts, Holzinger experiments with corporeal endurance and transgression to make power legible at the level of the body. The Austrian artist describes her multifaceted practice as creating experiences ‘always in relation to the body’, which she considers her starting point, her primary material and a means of radical agency: a conception rooted in her choreographic and performance work. In her compositions of image, sound and action, the body is the touchstone against which all objects and perceptions are measured. In collaboration with a team that brings expertise in a broad range of body-based practices and performance genres, her works experiment with body modification – in all its possible forms – as an interplay of transformation and illusion.

Holzinger carefully reflects on the different contexts in which viewers encounter or interact with her work, seeking to challenge and subvert the specific rules, habits and expectations each space carries. Elemental forces, such as water and bodily fluids, recur as material presences, used as agents that act upon bodies while implicating audiences who witness them. Brought into relation or contrast with human presence and imbued with immanent layers of meaning, objects are regarded by the artist as charged, resonant entities, acting as projection surfaces with the capacity to offer friction or resistance, or to act transformatively.

Holzinger’s works have been awarded the Nestroy (TANZ, 2020) and Faust awards (Ophelia’s Got Talent, 2023) and have been selected by Theatertreffen Berlin four times in a row (TANZ, Ophelia’s Got Talent, SANCTA, A Year Without Summer). Besides her stage productions, Holzinger creates Études, an ongoing series of site-specific, one-off performances in public space that have been presented in collaboration with Schinkel Pavillon Berlin, Bergen Kunsthall, Berlin Atonal festival and Wiener Festwochen, among others. Since 2021, she is associate artist at Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin. In 2026, she represents Austria at the Biennale Arte 2026, Venice.