Florentina Holzinger is an Austrian performance artist and choreographer whose practice moves across dance, theatre, opera, installation and the visual arts. Trained in choreography, she treats the body as both material and political territory, combining demanding physical actions with precisely constructed theatrical images. Her productions often bring together performers with backgrounds in dance, stunt work, circus and body-based practices. By placing forms associated with classical culture beside pop spectacle and counterculture, she examines bodily autonomy, power, gender and the limits imposed on bodies. Transformation, illusion and endurance recur throughout her work, while humour and excess prevent its confrontational imagery from settling into a single interpretation.
In 2026, Holzinger represents Austria at the 61st Venice Biennale with SEAWORLD VENICE, presented at the Austrian Pavilion from 9 May to 22 November. The project extends her long-running engagement with water through a continuously changing performance installation that combines pools, mechanical systems, live actions and sculptural structures. Conceived as an unstable ecosystem, it connects bodily fluids, waste processing, tourism and rising water levels to questions of ecological crisis and social control. The pavilion operates simultaneously as an amusement park, treatment plant and ritual space, challenging divisions between purity and pollution, nature and technology, spectacle and labour. Alongside the installation, site-specific Études expand the project into Venice and its lagoon.