Overview
‘My work looks for different contexts to exist within, I want to bring people to an ambiguous place.’
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.
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.
Videos
For Florentina Holzinger, ballet isn’t delicate, and opera isn’t sacred. In the ‘Holzinger system’, bodies, stunts, and machinery collide in a form of expertly, artistically crafted spectacle exploring pleasure, pain, and power. […] There is, by now, an unmistakable Holzinger aesthetic and its corresponding ecology of production.
A Holzinger work pushes and probes its spectators emotionally and sensorially, but it also pushes and probes its institutional contexts of production and display, revealing their gatekeeping and their blindspots, their conditions for accepting to be pushed.
— Anna Leon, dance historian
Austrian Pavilion Biennale Arte 2026
Water, levels rising; water, which we drink and excrete in countless cycles every day; water, a vital, life-sustaining natural resource and highly managed commodity; water, to plunge in, dive in, and emerge from, perhaps transformed. Blending dance, theatre, and performance, the Austrian artist Florentina Holzinger uses her long-standing research into the element of water—as both subject and symbol—as a point of departure for an exploration of the human body in a radically changing landscape, in which nature and technology collide.
The Austrian Pavilion becomes a machinic organism, in which action and its consequence on the body are negotiated. Underwater theme park, sewage treatment plant, and sacred building, all in one, SEAWORLD VENICE complicates the dualisms of purity and pollution, sin and expiation; and renders visible the rubbish that is kept out of sight yet remains constantly present.
SEAWORLD VENICE expands across the city through site-specific performances in water, air, and land. The series of experimental formats that Holzinger has been developing since 2020, titled Études, consists of site-specific choreographic exercises and performative actions in public space. Rising from the depths of the lagoon, where turbo-tourism’s rubbish lays to rest, and ascending into the city’s skies, Holzinger’s performers—human and otherwise—reveal the vulnerability and resilience of bodies and the world alike.
Holzinger’s feminist premise and the extreme physicality of her practice form an analogy and texture for visualising an (eco)system that has gone out of control. Rituals are deemed necessary to restore order, and so the dirt must be summoned: fleeting images and compositions that haunt us, edging the impossible.
Floodings caused by mankind, lives lived in the waste of others, robotic hellhounds that lead the way into the future. I live in your piss. Whose wet dream is this?
— Nora-Swantje Almes, Curator for the Austrian Pavilion 2026
Projects
