The choreographer Florentina Holzinger, whose genre-defying productions involving nudity, defecation and blood have left audience members being treated for nausea, is to join Thaddaeus Ropac gallery.
The announcement comes as Holzinger prepares to represent Austria at the 61st Venice Biennale this year. Her presentation, SEAWORLD VENICE, will include a series of site-specific performances across the Italian city, running from May to November 2026.
For Holzinger, working in a gallery, rather than with a theatre’s captive audience, will be a different challenge.
“In the theatre usually there’s a fixed spectatorship, in a gallery space you have a mobile spectatorship where the audience can determine how long they want to engage with the work,” she says. “To go into a new space means challenging the different habits and conditions of that place, and the different types of expectations. To be in a visual arts context is for me a matter of taking on another space and is a particular inspiration for my work.”
Holzinger studied choreography at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam. Her contemporary dance production TANZ was awarded the prestigious Nestroy Theatre Prize in 2020, and featured classical ballet blended with surreal spectacle. For its North American premiere at NYU Skirball, the theatre warned it contained “explicit nudity, blood, needles and hooks, and self-harming body acts”.
TANZ © Florentina Holzinger. Photo: Nada Žgank. Courtesy of City of Women
“My work thrives on navigating or surfing between genres,” Holzinger says. “It looks for different contexts to exist within and explores questions of who belongs in which space, who belongs on which stage and who belongs in which gallery. These are all things that I’m very playful with. What’s important for me is that I’m questioning the conventions and conditions of these places.”
Venice, one of the most vulnerable cities in the world to climate change-induced sea level rise, will be the focus of her Biennale production. SEAWORLD VENICE is described as “an underwater theme park, sewage treatment plant, and sacred building.”
Nora-Swantje Almes, the curator of the Austrian Pavilion in 2026, says about the project: “Florentina Holzinger paints an apocalyptic scenario that is already here, illustrating humankind’s complicity in a collapsing (eco)system: lives lived in the waste of others. She radically expands what is considered possible — a mindset that is contagious and that we need right now more than ever.”
Holzinger’s first exhibition at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery will be in Autumn 2027.
Thaddaeus Ropac says: “What we’ll show are objects that are meant to be used, and can also be activated. The work will have a certain gravitas and patina from the performances, but she is intentional in how it can be separated and looked at in a more neutral space of a gallery, and it doesn’t necessarily need the performance to explain itself.”
