At the 61st Venice Biennale, Austria’s Pavilion becomes a site of transformation with “SeaWorld Venice,” a new commission by Florentina Holzinger curated by Nora-Swantje Almes. Expanding beyond the pavilion into the city itself, the project unfolds through installation, performance, and a series of site-specific Études staged across Venice and its lagoon. Known for her uncompromising approach to the body as both subject and medium, Holzinger here turns to water as a charged element—ecological, political, and symbolic. Nora-Swantje Almes shares how the project redefines exhibition-making, inviting audiences into an evolving system shaped by presence, participation, and place.
Water as Medium
Florentina Holzinger, 2026, photo by Katia Wik.
“Ophelia’s Got Talent,” © Nicole Marianna Wytyczak, Florentina Holzinger, 2022.
WHITEWALL: SEAWORLD VENICE unfolds across installation, performance, and site-specific actions throughout the city. How did you approach shaping a curatorial framework that could hold such a fluid, multi-sited project together?
NORA-SWANTJE ALMES: The artistic practice always determines the curatorial framework. With Florentina Holzinger’s embodied practice, we work with different temporalities, modi of performativity and intensity. SEAWORLD VENICE consists of two components: The Austrian Pavilion, an installation with permanent bodily presence and a format titled Études that we bring outside the city. It’s a series Holzinger has developed since 2020: performative actions in public space. They are highly complex compositions with a short duration, important material studies and hold a peak intensity. Both pillars are equally important and conceptually linked.
WW: Water operates here as both material and metaphor—ecological, political, and bodily. What drew you to this element as a central throughline for the pavilion, particularly in the context of Venice?
NSA: Florentina has intensively researched the element of water in her stage work Ophelia’s Got Talent. Water is a highly ambivalent element. It is a vital resource, a controlled commodity, a threat, a symbol of transformation and, of course, runs through our bodies in endless cycles. Water is also the material myths are made of. Sirens, nymphs, mermaids – female figures of the Western cultural canon that are seductive, ‘dangerous’ and that ‘need to be controlled’. Venice is a city suspended in beauty and collapse, where mass-tourism and ecological precarity collide. It is particularly threatened by the climate crisis and flooding. We are complicit in contributing to the rising sea levels, as are the visitors to the Biennale. Water is also a natural mirror. In SEAWORLD VENICE, Florentina paints an apocalyptic scenario: What if life on land as we know it, is no longer possible?
“Water is a highly ambivalent element.”
–Nora-Swantje Almes.
WW: You’ve worked closely with Florentina Holzinger on prior projects. How has her practice evolved in recent years, and what feels newly expanded or challenged in this Biennale commission?
NSA: I worked with Florentina on the commission Harbour Étude for Bergen Kunsthall in 2024. I have always been very fascinated by her imagery and the compositions of her stage productions. Moving away from the theatre space with the Étude format was a significant expansion of her practice for me. For the Austrian Pavilion, in the context of the Biennale, the most challenging question was how to bring the intensity of her work into an exhibition running over seven months. Rather than thinking about the Pavilion setting as a theater show, SEAWORLD VENICE embraces the exhibition context and its parameters such as fixed opening hours or visitor flow. In live exhibition formats, the exhibition itself becomes a space for experiment and research, thus a site for constant transformation. The audience is the last puzzle piece. No day will be the same.
Audience as Catalyst
“Ophelia’s Got Talent,” © Bahar Kaygusuz, by Florentina Holzinger, 2023.
WW: Holzinger’s work often pushes the limits of the body—physically, socially, and symbolically. As a curator focused on performance within visual art contexts, how do you navigate presenting such intensity within an exhibition format?
NSA: Florentina’s work always centers the real body, regardless of context. At the Biennale, it is exciting for us to bring her work to a wide audience. I believe encountering real bodies in an exhibition context might still be a confrontational moment for some visitors. In her stage productions, the sequences of scenes are quick, intense, multi-layered. Her imagery holds a painterly quality, sometimes I felt like I am looking at a Hieronymos Bosch painting: Symbolically charged, otherworldly, yet deeply relational. In her performances, the images are fleeting. I wanted to see them longer. In the exhibition setting we now can, while we still maintain the ephemeral character of her work through performative actions. Rather than working with the individual galleries, the entire Austrian Pavilion becomes an installation in the form of a machinic organism negotiating action and consequence.
“The audience is a key factor in performative exhibition formats.”
–Nora-Swantje Almes.
WW: The project extends beyond the pavilion into Venice’s public spaces through the Études. What role does the audience—and even the city itself—play in activating the work?
NSA: The audience is a key factor in performative exhibition formats. Their presence and energy matter and shape the experience. In SEAWORLD VENICE, there is even co-dependency: we rely on the audiences’ contributions. The system needs input to keep running, to keep the art going, to keep the Pavilion afloat. Maybe Venice is a cast member in the project? Its cultural context is made for a Holzinger work. For me, her works are a similar to Venice itself. On the surface, they are seductive visual experiences, entertaining spectacles, but the deeper one ventures, the closer one comes to a darker seriousness. Beneath Venice, sewage systems are largely regulated by the tides that flush feces out of the city twice a day. This remains mostly unnoticed, apart from the occasional smell in the air. Florentina lays open those dynamics and systems.
What to Know:
“Schrott-Etude,” © Hyesoo Chung, Florentina Holzinger, 2023.
Don’t Miss: A select number of live, site-specific Études, short, high-intensity performances that activate the city itself.
Why it Matters: The project rethinks the pavilion as a living, evolving system—where performance, audience, and environment are inseparable.
Dates: May 9 – November 22, 2026.
Venue: Austrian Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale.
Special Program: Site-specific actions staged throughout Venice and its lagoon during the preview week.
