- Title:
- Performance at the Venice Biennale
- Author:
- Caroline Ferreira
- Date:
- 24.09.26
The Body Is Not a Permanent Material
These words by Florentina Holzinger, representing Austria at the Venice Biennale, perfectly encapsulate the ambitious project she presents, while also serving as a sharp point of reflection on the performance program unfolding across the Austrian, Belgian, Netherlands and Japanese national pavilions. For the first time in the history of the Biennale, four nations place performance at the centre of their presentations.
Performance has, of course, been present in Venice for decades. Marina Abramovic won the Golden Lion in 1997 for her iconic Balkan Baroque. Anne Imhof won the Golden Lion for Germany in 2017 and Lina Lapelytė, Vaiva Grainyte and Rugile Barzdziukaite won for Lithuania in 2019. Yet the decision to build an entire pavilion around live work remains unusual. The logistical and economic demands are immense. Performers repeat actions for months; the work of technicians and producers resembles that of repertory theatre, while the exhibition is presented for seven months long and artists must negotiate the challenge of creating works capable of surviving hundreds of iterations, while remaining meaningful to audiences who may encounter them for only a few minutes.
What emerges this year is not a shared aesthetic but a common preoccupation with endurance, labour, care and survival. The body becomes a site where ecological anxieties, political tensions and social contradictions are rendered visible. These projects also signal a broader shift in the relationship between performance and the exhibition format. Following landmark precedents such as Anne Imhof’s Faust (2017) and the Lithuanian Pavilion’s Sun & Sea (Marina) (2019) by artists whose practices were primarily developed in museums and gallery spaces, this year artists whose practice sits prominently within the frames of theatre and choreography test how their vocabulary might inhabit a gallery space.
The result is one of the most performance-driven editions of the Biennale ever. Significantly, this emphasis on action, exertion and repetition arrives in tension with the international exhibition conceived by the late curator Koyo Kouoh. Her theme, In Minor Keys, proposed forms of attention that resist spectacle and favour quieter, “less exhausting” modes of engagement. Many of the performances unfolding across the national pavilions move in the opposite direction. They are loud, physically demanding and often overwhelming. Yet they share Kouoh’s concern with how bodies persist under pressure.
Florentina Holzinger, SEAWORLD VENICE, 2026, performance documentation, Venice Biennale. Photo and ©: Nicole Marianna Wytyczak.
Among them, Florentina Holzinger’s SEAWORLD VENICE (2026), curated by Nora-Swantje Almes, is undoubtedly the most spectacular. The Austrian choreographer has become one of Europe’s most influential performance makers through creations that combine dance, theatre, opera, circus and visual art. Frequently described as a descendant of Viennese Actionism, Holzinger has consistently explored the body as a site of risk, agency and transformation. The New Yorker once dubbed her practice “a feminist freak show.”1 Built around a predominantly feminine cast, her work features performers climbing heavy machinery, suspending themselves in mid-air, enduring tattooing, piercing and acts of apparent self-endangerment. Yet unlike the masculinist violence often associated with Actionism, Holzinger’s work is centred on female bodies reclaiming forms of physical extremity that have historically been denied to them. By dealing with these naked bodies, the artist confronts the audience with questions of eroticism, pornography and exploitation.
SEAWORLD VENICE marks an important development within her practice. While she insists she is not a durational performance artist, the Biennale format forces her work into precisely that condition. The challenge becomes less how to produce a spectacular event than how to maintain a living ecosystem over seven months. The Austrian Pavilion is transformed into a strange hybrid environment oscillating between a water park, wastewater treatment facility, temple and industrial plant. Upon entering, visitors are greeted by the declaration: “I live in your piss.” The statement functions simultaneously as provocation, ecological reminder and curatorial thesis. Water, waste, bodies and machines circulate through the building in a continuous metabolic system. The pavilion appears to digest everything that enters it.
Florentina Holzinger, SEAWORLD VENICE, 2026, performance documentation, Venice Biennale. Photo and ©: Nicole Marianna Wytyczak.
This logic extends beyond metaphor. Visitors are invited to contribute bodily fluids to the work. Their participation becomes part of the pavilion’s internal circulation system, collapsing distinctions between audience and performer, observer and material. Throughout the installation, suspiciously brown water bursts from pipes, filtration systems malfunction, performers struggle with leaking machinery and groups of cleaners endlessly mop the floors. The building behaves less like an exhibition space than a living organism perpetually attempting to regulate itself.
The work continues concerns already visible in Ophelia’s Got Talent (2022), one of the artist’s recent productions for the stage, already centred around the thematic of water, where it functioned simultaneously as medium, threat and spectacle. In Venice however, the aquatic element acquires a particular resonance. A city whose existence depends upon the management of water becomes the ideal setting for a work concerned with systems of circulation, contamination and survival.
As in many of Holzinger’s projects, the dramaturgy oscillates between comedy and catastrophe. Performers are suspended from cranes, submerged in pools, transformed into the clapper of an enormous bell or manoeuvre jet skis in absurdly small basins. Humour frequently accompanies danger. What distinguishes the work is not simply its scale but its insistence on dissolving boundaries: between human and machine, clean and dirty, natural and technological. The body is revealed as porous, vulnerable and entangled within larger systems of extraction and waste. The chaos generated by the work ultimately produces a vision of contemporary life as permanent crisis management. Bodies struggle, adapt and persist. If the pavilion resembles an ecosystem, it is one permanently on the verge of collapse.
Miet Warlop, IT NEVER SSST, 2026, performance documentation, Venice Biennale. Photo: Sjoerd Tanghe.
If Holzinger’s project imagines the body caught within ecological systems, Miet Warlop’s IT NEVER SSST (2026) approaches it through labour, language and rhythm. Curated by Caroline Dumalin for the Belgian Pavilion, the project continues a trajectory that has made Warlop one of Europe’s most distinctive figures operating between contemporary art and performance. Trained as a visual artist before moving into theatre, she demonstrates an ability to generate powerful emotional experiences through repetition, accumulation and collective effort such as in her acclaimed work One Song.
She describes her Venice pavilion as a “living musical sculpture.” The space is occupied by nine performers and musicians engaged in what appears to be an endless task. More than 200 plasterboards fabricated on site, engraved with words in multiple languages, are carried, arranged, raised, stacked and ultimately smashed. The performers work to the point of exhaustion. Their black clothing gradually becomes covered in white dust. The atmosphere is simultaneously industrial and ritualistic.
Miet Warlop, IT NEVER SSST, 2026, performance documentation, Venice Biennale. Photo: Sjoerd Tanghe.
Music plays a central role. The score drives the performance forward with relentless momentum. Percussion instruments are embedded within the architecture itself, constructed with wooden shelves that the performers have to constantly climb. The pavilion becomes both a stage and an instrument. The dramaturgy emerges through action rather than narrative. Words carved into the plasterboards occasionally form fragments of meaning before disappearing again amidst movement and destruction. Language appears as something perpetually sought but never fully attained. Communication remains incomplete.
Warlop has described the project as originating from the idea of a phone call from the planet itself: a message that simply says, “I’m not doing well.”2 The performers’ activity becomes a response to that call. Their labour is both futile and necessary. This tension gives the work its emotional force. The endless carrying, arranging and breaking of materials recalls contemporary forms of productivity, in which effort rarely guarantees resolution. Yet unlike many critiques of labour that foreground alienation, IT NEVER SSST insists upon collective action. Meaning emerges not through achievement but through persistence.
Warlop transforms the conditions of exhibition-making into dramaturgical material. The performance’s repetitive structure mirrors the rhythms of contemporary attention. Yet it also offers resistance to them. Against the accelerated consumption of images that characterises much of the Biennale experience, IT NEVER SSST insists on duration, effort and physical presence. The performance becomes a rhythmic machine that never stops, overwhelming the visitor. Yet it is also a beautiful call for resilience amid global chaos.
Miet Warlop, IT NEVER SSST, 2026, performance documentation, Venice Biennale. Photo: Sjoerd Tanghe.
The Dutch Pavilion offers a dramatically different proposition. Created by Dries Verhoeven and curated by Rieke Vos, The Fortress (2026) rejects spectacle almost entirely. Yet it may be one of the most unsettling works presented at Venice. Verhoeven’s practice has long investigated the moral contradictions of contemporary European society. Working across installation, theatre and public intervention, he frequently examines the relationship between liberal ideals and exclusionary political realities. For Venice, he focuses on what he calls “fortress thinking:” the psychological, emotional and political reflex through which individuals and nations attempt to protect themselves while maintaining an image of innocence.
The intervention begins with architecture. The modernist pavilion designed by Gerrit Rietveld has historically functioned as a symbol of openness and post-war optimism. Verhoeven gradually transforms this architectural promise into its opposite. Mechanical shutters close completely at the beginning of the performance, extinguishing daylight until the building is plunged into complete darkness at the end. Visitors are informed beforehand that they will be unable to leave for twenty-five minutes. This simple decision fundamentally alters the conditions of spectatorship. In the context of the Biennale—where visitors often rush between dozens of exhibitions in a single day—enforced stillness becomes radical. The work requires surrender.
Dries Verhoeven, The Fortress, 2026, performance documentation, Venice Biennale. Photo: Willem Popelier.
At the centre of the space stands a performer who appears like a gasping, agonising figure. They start to speak, though language gradually disintegrates into low guttural sounds inspired by death-metal vocal techniques. Fragments of recognisable speech emerge only intermittently: “help yourself,” “smile.” The voice becomes an organic matter rather than communication. As the electric lights gradually fade, darkness deepens and the audience’s dependence on vision begins to fail. The performer’s sounds seem to emerge from somewhere beyond language and rational discourse.
The transformation of the pavilion is particularly powerful because it operates through inversion. Visitors first encounter the building as it was conceived: open, luminous and optimistic. Gradually, however, cracks, stains and signs of deterioration become apparent in the building. The modernist dream reveals its fragility and through this architectural intervention, the pavilion is ultimately recast as an oppressive bunker. The gradual transformation of the pavilion into a fortified refuge evokes societies increasingly organised around security, defence and the management of perceived external threats. Presented as a meditation on transition and self-preservation, the work ultimately reads as a fierce critique of contemporary progressive democracies, their frailties and their contradictions.
Dries Verhoeven, The Fortress, 2026, performance documentation, Venice Biennale. Photo: Willem Popelier.
If Verhoeven’s project explores self-protection and exclusion, Ei Arakawa-Nash's Japanese Pavilion centres on care. Curated by Lisa Horikawa and Mizuki Takahashi, Grass Babies, Moon Babies (2026) emerges from a profoundly personal context. Arakawa-Nash, who has lived in the United States since 1998 and whose performative practice has been widely exhibited internationally, recently became the father of twins. The Pavilion thus draws directly upon their experiences of queer parenting. Yet the work quickly expands beyond autobiography to address broader questions concerning labour, reproduction and national context.
Visitors entering the pavilion encounter dozens of baby dolls weighing approximately six kilograms, each wearing sunglasses that lend the scene an air of absurdity. They are invited to carry these dolls throughout the exhibition and surrounding garden. The gesture appears playful. It is also physically demanding. Almost immediately, participants become aware of the labour involved in care. The pavilion itself resembles a nursery populated by milk bottles, changing stations and rocking chairs. Visitors may choose to change the dolls’ nappies, activating QR codes that generate personalised “diaper poems” written in collaboration with astrologer and writer Ishii Yukari. These interactions transform spectators into temporary caregivers. The work acknowledges tenderness, while insisting on labour. Care is presented as joyful, exhausting, repetitive and socially structured.
Ei Arakawa-Nash, Grass Babies, Moon Babies, 2026, performance documentation, Venice Biennale. Photo: Uli Holz.
The political implications are particularly resonant within the Japanese context. Japan faces ongoing debates concerning declining birth rates, reproductive labour and demographic transformation. Arakawa-Nash’s position as a queer parent introduces additional layers. Same-sex marriage remains unrecognised in Japan, making the work’s vision of family quietly but unmistakably political. The dolls themselves function as mediators between an intimate experience and larger historical forces. Their fictional birthdays connect personal narratives to broader social histories, suggesting that every act of care unfolds within systems that exceed the individual. Unlike the spectacular gestures of Holzinger or the overwhelming energy of Warlop, Arakawa-Nash operates through small encounters, laughter and spontaneous connections between visitors. Yet their project may ultimately ask one of the Biennale’s most urgent questions: how might care function as a collective practice rather than a private responsibility?
Ei Arakawa-Nash, Grass Babies, Moon Babies, 2026, performance documentation, Venice Biennale. Photo: Uli Holz.
The most compelling pavilions are undoubtedly those of Austria and Belgium, whose artists successfully translate choreographic thinking into an exhibition context without sacrificing complexity. Rather than adapting theatre to the gallery, they create forms that belong specifically to the conditions of the gallery space. At a moment when contemporary art frequently privileges images and objects, these works insist on live presence. Their bodies become the medium through which ecological collapse, social fragmentation, democratic anxiety and reproductive labour are made tangible.
In this sense, Holzinger’s phrase resonates beyond the Austrian Pavilion. The body is indeed not a permanent material. Yet precisely because of its fragility, it remains one of the most powerful tools available for understanding the present. Across Venice this year, artists repeatedly return to that fact. Whether by carrying babies, smashing plasterboards, navigating contaminated waters or speaking into darkness, performance exposes the vulnerabilities that contemporary societies often seek to conceal. Far from offering escape, these works insist that the body remains the place where political realities are felt most acutely.
Caroline Ferreira is a writer and curator based in Paris. From 2016 to 2024, she was Artistic Director of Move Festival at Centre Pompidou, a cross-disciplinary program dedicated to dance, performance and moving-image. Presented across the museum's galleries, collection spaces, theatres and terraces, Move brought together exhibitions, performances and screenings, exploring new intersections between visual art and live art.
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