Florentina Holzinger — À propos — Slash Paris

Florentina Holzinger does not enter the stage she erupts onto it. Her work seeks neither elegance nor demonstration but ordeal. An ordeal of the body first subjected to extreme regimes of tension, falling, constraint, repetition, and surpassing, but also an ordeal of the gaze, constantly placed at the edge of its own threshold of tolerance. In her work the stage is never a neutral space it is a field of operations where radical gestures are inscribed, sometimes violent, often jubilant, always irreversible.

Born in Vienna in 1986, trained in choreography and performance in Amsterdam within the SNDO program, Florentina Holzinger has developed for more than a decade a body of work that unsettles categories. Theatre, dance, performance, opera, martial arts, acrobatics, symbolic surgery, and pagan rituals intermingle without hierarchy. Her pieces turn away from narrative logic to stage experience, situation, and the experimentation of limits for performers as much as for audiences. The female body is central yet never assigned it is at once subject, surface of inscription, and ungovernable force. She presents trained, powerful bodies capable of enduring pain, nudity, real risk, and excess.

This radicality is grounded in a precise political reflection on the legacy of ballet, the mythologies of purity, the medicalization of bodies, the patriarchal domination of cultural narratives, the place of religion, and the spectacularization of violence. In works such as Apollon, TANZ, and Recovery, Florentina Holzinger diverts classical canons to reveal their disciplinary mechanisms while reinventing forms of collective power. More recently her work in the operatic field, notably with the opera Sancta, has confirmed her ability to shift heavy institutions toward zones of disturbance and friction, in a tense balance between experimentation and spectacle.

What is most striking is the materiality of her theatre. Each piece is constructed as a visual and physical machine in which devices, props, bodies, and spaces form a sculptural ensemble in motion, moments that activate a playground, a field of possibilities. Blood, sweat, fluids, prostheses, machines, and glossy or abrasive surfaces compose an immediately recognizable iconography. Time is dense, almost stratified, and each image seems able to detach itself from the stage and become autonomous.

It is precisely in this dimension that the connection with the visual arts becomes evident. Florentina Holzinger’s work produces forms, images, and gestures that belong to a sculptural thinking of the body and space. The stage becomes a temporary studio, a site of fabrication where the work emerges in and through living matter. This approach explains her entry into the field of contemporary art and, in 2026, her inclusion among the artists represented by the gallery Thaddaeus Ropac as well as her participation in the Venice Biennale 2026, during which she will represent her country in the Austrian Pavilion. Where other artists move performance toward the object, Florentina Holzinger brings to the art world a corporeal intensity and conceptual rigor that expand the very field of what a visual artwork can be today. A way of making the performed body no longer an instrument illustrating an idea but its most direct and immediate form.

L.D.