Florentina Holzinger SEAWORLD VENICE

SEAWORLD VENICE is a bold new interdisciplinary commission curated by Nora-Swantje Almes (Gropius Bau, Berlin). Known for her genre-defying work that challenges socio-political conventions, Florentina Holzinger conceptualises the Austrian Pavilion as, at once, a sacred building, underwater theme park and sewage treatment plant. Visitors’ bodily fluids are turned into living quarters for performers inhabiting the Austrian Pavilion, while also actively contributing to the pavilion’s flooding. Holzinger’s work takes the form of a machinic organism in which action and its consequences are continuously negotiated, exploring the body within a radically changing landscape where nature and technology collide. The project features a permanent live installation at the Austrian Pavilion, alongside site-specific Études – an ongoing body of work the artist has been developing since 2020, consisting of performative actions in public space, marking the opening and closing moments of SEAWORLD VENICE.

A photographic edition, Opening Étude SEAWORLD VENICE, by Florentina Holzinger is now available to purchase. All proceeds will contribute to SEAWORLD VENICE, supporting the realisation of the artist’s Études.

Water levels rising; water that we drink and excrete in countless cycles every day; water, vital, life-sustaining natural resource and highly managed commodity; water, to plunge in, dive in and emerge from, transformed. In SEAWORLD VENICE, Holzinger explores concepts of purity and impurity, cleanliness and dirt, which are integral both to the water world and to societal and religious belief systems. Purification cycles and rituals are deemed necessary to restore order. Here, the artist makes these visible and proposes that order itself is unstable.

At the back of the pavilion, the promise of progress continues to unfold as a ‘Frankensteinesque’ dystopia: robot dogs move through rising water behind glass, acting as mechanical watchdogs for a central sacrificial altar – a large aquarium flanked by toilets. In the courtyard, a performer lives inside a water tank sustained by visitors’ urine, inhabiting the Austrian Pavilion continuously throughout the Biennale. This closed-loop recycling system serves as a visceral reflection of a global order in which vulnerable populations and entire nations are relegated to the waste of the powerful. Living in this reservoir, the performer strips away the inherited romanticism of Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (1510) – art history’s first-known reclining nude, painted in Venice. She is no longer a silent muse resting on velvet, but a survivor staring out from the wreckage of a civilisation dissolved in urine. In a city where mass tourism collides with ecological fragility, the idea of ‘beauty’ in Venice cannot be separated from the waste it produces.

As curator Nora-Swantje Almes explains: ‘At the Austrian Pavilion, Florentina Holzinger depicts humankind’s complicity in collapsing systems, questioning established structures and the apparent order of things—and revealing that order itself is inherently unstable. SEAWORLD VENICE pushes the limits of exhibition-making, redefining the pavilion as a temporal, porous system in constant transformation. The water’s surface becomes a reflective mirror, turning SEAWORLD VENICE into an encounter with the self.’