Holzinger Unveils 8-Hour 'Seaworld Venice' at Biennale, With Naked Jetskiers and Urine-Fed Tank
Updated
Updated · The Guardian · May 19
Holzinger Unveils 8-Hour 'Seaworld Venice' at Biennale, With Naked Jetskiers and Urine-Fed Tank
1 articles · Updated · The Guardian · May 19
Austria’s Venice Biennale pavilion has opened with Florentina Holzinger’s “Seaworld Venice,” an eight-hour-a-day performance installation featuring nude jetski stunts, a bell-hoisted performer and a diver submerged for four hours.
The show turns the pavilion into a working sustainability system: two Portaloos feed filtered liquid into the glass tank, making waste and water central to the artwork rather than a backstage necessity.
Holzinger said the piece challenges why nudity in classical art is accepted while “real bodies” are treated as provocative, and ties that question to labor by rotating performers between stunts and toilet duty.
Visitors have already tested the production’s limits outside the theater setting, filming despite no-photo rules and helping trigger a temporary suspension of Holzinger’s Instagram account.
Running until Nov. 22, the work extends Holzinger’s reputation for physically extreme, darkly comic performances that confront women’s bodies, religion and spectacle.
Does Holzinger’s extreme art empower its performers or simply turn their endurance into a spectacle for consumption?
As Holzinger challenges art history in Venice, is her work a new feminist milestone or just fleeting provocation?