It has to hurt Performance-Star Florentina Holzinger

The Viennese extreme performer and choreographer Florentina Holzinger is now taking the art world by storm with her troupe of nude Amazons. An encounter in Vienna and at Schloss Prinzendorf, on the path to new thresholds of pain.

The steel hooks are – and you can't imagine this vividly enough – drilled into the women’s bare skin. As the performer Florentina Holzinger and her twelve accomplices – or perhaps, more aptly, apostles – are hoisted aloft completely naked, their ropes are still attached to four hooks: two above the knees, two beside the shoulder blades. So that it looks as though they are sitting upright as they toast one another with wine from a raised tray, hanging like marionettes – in a very particular interpretation of ‘The Last Supper’. Then, as the tabletop is lowered again, the performers release the lower ropes. Now their entire body weight is suspended only from the two hooks in their partly bloodied backs. Ouch.

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It was the eerie, bombastic finale of that seven-hour outdoor spectacle which Holzinger and her co-performers – as unashamed as they were fearless – staged under the title “Pfingstspiel” as part of the Vienna Festival – beginning with a “Prologue” in the afternoon at the Vienna Skating Club, ending with this nocturnal epiphany at Schloss Prinzendorf, the very place where the Austrian blood and action artist Hermann Nitsch lived and developed his Orgy-Mystery-Theatre. […]

“I’m super happy that we managed to pull this off in such a short time,” says Holzinger the next morning. “For us as a group, as a team, this was a significant event.” The 40-year-old speaks to us via Teams from the Vienna airport. In an hour, her flight leaves for Melbourne, where she is performing her Berlin Volksbühne extravaganza “A Year without Summer”. Holzinger, “Europe’s hottest director”, as The Guardian described her in 2024, is booked solid. The fact that she is staging the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale under the motto “Seaworld Venice” with her typical intensity and nudity – including a jet-ski show and a diving stunt into a urine pool – is currently boosting her visibility immensely. Visitors queue for up to two and a half hours outside the pavilion. Holzinger tries to be there in person as often as possible, even “as the toilet attendant”.