VENICE — Unless you were attending a silent retreat the past few weeks, you already know that no other Venice Biennale in recent history has gotten off to a more fraught start than this year’s. In May 2025, its artistic director, Koyo Kouoh, passed away. Then there were canceled pavilions, boycotts protesting Israel and Russia’s participation, and the jury’s resignation. Kouoh’s summons to take a deep breath and exhale was, to say the least, a challenging request.
In the midst of this upheaval, two national pavilions in the Giardini — the Austrian and the Belgian — slice straight through the outside rumbling with boldly experimental and imaginative performances that demanded sustained attention.
The choreographer and performance artist Florentina Holzinger took over the Austrian pavilion with SEA WORLD VENICE, and she wanted anything but for you to close your eyes and shift into lower frequencies — rather, she wants you to experience, with eyes wide open, the world in all its ecological doom. And she demands that you participate. Societal collapse has rarely been so enthralling.
For years now, Holzinger has been a star of the European avant-garde theater world, creating epic spectacles with diverse, all-female casts that sometimes leave audience members (I count myself among them) gasping for air. Her mesmerizing stagecraft — typically marked by queer feminist aesthetics and female nudity so hyper-present that it is no longer a source of mystification — is fully on view in her Venice presentation. One woman is a clapper inside a huge bell, banging it on the hour with her torso. Other performers are suspended from harnesses like gravity-defying sculptures on an immense, slowly turning weathervane.
In SEA WORLD VENICE, Holzinger floods the pavilion’s severe modern architecture with water and transforms it into a closed-loop circuit powered by our complicity: In the courtyard, visitors are invited to piss in two bright blue porta-potties flanking a massive water tank fed by the filtered urine, in which an impassive performer wearing only a scuba mask and mouthpiece remains submerged for hours at a time.
Next door is a kind of sewage station where “maintenance workers” frantically try to manage out-of-control tubes, spraying the windows with a vile-looking brown fluid. Inside the flooded pavilion, another performer jet-skis in circles at full speed. It is an aquatic theme park gone awry — presumably the result of our lack of care and greed — and we are hopelessly submerged in it.
Installation views of IT NEVER SSST, Miet Warlop’s presentation at the Belgian pavilion of the 2026 Venice Biennale
A few hundred yards away, Miet Warlop transforms the Belgian pavilion into something between a construction site and a sports arena, with bleachers lined with plaster tiles etched with multilingual greetings and fragments of speech (“SST,” “HOLA,” “OUI,” “STOP,” “SALAM”…). IT NEVER SSST marks the first time Belgium has devoted its pavilion to performance. Throughout the opening hours, performers — Warlop’s “living sculptures” — frenetically darted up and down, hurling tiles between one another while ritualistically chanting, dancing, drumming, and stomping. Warlop has a background in visual arts; her signature is visually arresting tableaux vivants bristling with controlled chaos, with undercurrents of alienation and longing. She has carved out a distinctive place for herself in the experimental theater circuit, as seen in recent works such as Inhale Delirium Exhale, which I saw in Madrid last March, in which performers manipulated — at times mastering, and at others struggling with — 1,500 yards of silk.
One of the most affecting performances in Warlop’s pavilion is a solo by cast member Alice Marchiori. She begins by spinning a record, and instantly, Barry White’s deep, velvety, albeit distorted, voice fills the space. Then, standing only an arm’s length from the audience, Marchiori painstakingly struggles to put on a constricting miniskirt cast in plaster — Warlop calls it “the skirt inside the head,” curator Caroline Dumalin told me — her legs bearing bruises from the effort, before proceeding to climb the bleachers. The grueling sequence folds together Warlop’s language of instability, endurance, and collapse.
Marchiori’s mix of athleticism and almost ecstatic concentration brings the room to a standstill. During the seemingly endless climb, the constricting skirt progressively crumbles against her body. Then, finally, we feel a collective sense of cathartic release when her body rolls perilously down the bleachers, sending plaster tiles crashing to the floor on the way down. Sweaty and covered in plaster dust, she then rolls onto a table and simply lies there, breathing. We finally exhale.
Installation views of IT NEVER SSST, Miet Warlop’s presentation at the Belgian pavilion of the 2026 Venice Biennale
Installation views of SEA WORLD VENICE, Florentina Holzinger’s presentation at the Austrian pavilion of the 2026 Venice Biennale
Miet Warlop: IT NEVER SSST and Florentina Holzinger: Seaworld Venice continue at the Belgian pavilion and Austrian pavilion, respectively, at the 2026 Venice Biennale (Giardini della Biennale, Calle Giazzo, Venice, Italy) through November 22. The exhibitions were curated by Caroline Dumalin and Nora-Swantje Almes, respectively.
