At this yr’s Venice Biennale, the efficiency artist and choreographer Florentina Holzinger used the stage of the Austria Pavilion to alert viewers to an more and more underwater dystopia. Seaworld Venice issued a dire warning of the flood to return: an underwater amusement park and a circling jet-ski signaled ecological disaster pushed by turbo-tourism, whereas a bunch of performers climbed an infinite weathervane as a testomony to the energy of collective motion, and a performer lived in a reconstructed sewer remedy plant, in a tank sustained by physique fluids contributed by the viewers.
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It was, definitely, among the many most talked about pavilions at this yr’s Biennale.
On Could 23, nonetheless sopping from seaworld, Holzinger opened “Pfingstspiel” (Pentecost Play), at Hermann Nitsch’s fortress in Prinzendorf an der Zaya close to Vienna.
The 9-hour, one-time efficiency—created in collaboration with the Wiener Festwochen arts pageant and the Nitsch Basis—served as a complement to her Venice work. Nitsch, who died in 2022, is usually considered the daddy of the Sixties radical efficiency artwork motion Viennese Actionism, whose ethos Holzinger mentioned in relation to her personal in a New York Instances article following the efficiency.
“Actionism was so graphic and violent and loud and noisy as a result of there was [a] robust need to interrupt this blanket of silence,” Holzinger instructed the Instances. “Conceptually, I can completely relate to this,” she added. “It’s necessary to be generally radical in statements, to make use of artwork as an influence, as a instrument, in opposition to belongings you’re not OK with.”
Holzinger has spent the previous decade constructing a status as certainly one of Europe’s most uncompromising efficiency artists—filling opera homes and theaters with motorbikes, helicopters, heavy equipment, nudity, and feats of endurance that check what a physique can face up to. The mounting reputation of her efficiency caught the eye of Thaddaeus Ropac, who started representing her earlier this yr.
Her work usually depends on extravagant, salient spectacle. Very similar to Seaworld, Pentecost Play makes use of shock to power viewers to take care of the viscerality of what they’re seeing: a paraglider wears a fowl costume as they flit by means of the sky, a monster truck mauls different, smaller automobiles, a girl hanging from a window in only a harness smashes her physique in opposition to metallic, and performers pinch every others’ our bodies with metallic clips.
“We do what folks understand as merciless issues to our our bodies, however the backside line is that we’re in control of it,” Holzinger mentioned, within the Instances article. “Individuals are shocked by seeing girls who’re in command of themselves, however they’re not shocked by studying about femicides across the globe. That violence is one thing we’re used to.”
