The exhibition in the Polish Pavilion in Venice – in which sound and choral singing play such a crucial role – enters into deep resonance with the spirit of this year’s biennale. It’s difficult, in fact, to find a pavilion that aligns with the concept of this edition’s artistic director, Koyo Kouoh, as precisely as the Polish one. The curator, who died a year ago, proposed the phrase ‘In Minor Keys’ as the biennale’s theme. Her programmatic text is full of musical metaphors and references to communal singing.
The exhibition Liquid Tongues, prepared by Bogna Burska, Daniel Kotowski and Choir in Motion, simultaneously slots into something larger: an ideological paradigm whose intellectual backbone is postcolonial, ecological and posthumanist critique of the civilisational model inherited from modernity. And into an understanding of art as a community-building space – a field rooted in participation, in amplifying minority voices and in surfacing what is drowned out by dominant discourses.
But how does Liquid Tongues fit with expectations of Polish representation in Venice? And what exactly are we expecting from it?
The seagull & the queue
During the press days, the queue for the Austrian Pavilion grew so long at one point that it began at the entrance to the Polish Pavilion. That is quite some distance. Everyone wanted to get into the Austrian exhibition. They were prepared to wait hours for the privilege.
Everyone also photographed the seagull that had built its nest in front of the Polish Pavilion, laid three eggs in it, and was diligently sitting on them throughout the preview, despite a crowd of art-world citizens milling around it.
The queue stretching from Polonia to Austria that day was not the only thing linking the exhibitions in these two pavilions. Both feature the aquatic environment as a key element, and both are driven by motifs of immersion and diving. Both are rooted in performance. These affinities, however, only sharpen the difference between the two projects. They deploy the same figures in diametrically opposed ways – and are, in fact, founded on two antithetical approaches to art itself.
For whom Florentina Holzinger’s bell tolls
Every biennale has its iconic exhibition – the one everyone talks about most and queues longest to see. It is easily identified by precisely that: the longest queue. In 2017, the line formed to see Faust staged by Anne Imhof and her troupe in the German Pavilion. Two years later, everyone wanted to see the opera staged on an artificial beach in the Lithuanian Pavilion. At the last biennale, audiences once again besieged the German Pavilion, where Yael Bartana and Ersan Mondtag’s installations were showing.
Biennale hits do not always win Golden Lions, but they linger in the memory. Striking numbers of them are performative exhibitions, sometimes balanced on the edge of theatrical spectacle. Does the public prefer watching living people to viewing artefacts? Perhaps. What’s certain is that audiences are also captivated by charismatic individuals – figures like Bartana, Mondtag or Imhof.
Florentina Holzinger, this year’s representative for Austria, fits the profile of a biennale star perfectly. She comes to the art world from dance and choreography, working across disciplinary boundaries, but the performing human body – most often female and naked – remains her preferred medium. And she genuinely knows how to hold attention: she has stunt-performer skills, is as athletic as a comic-book superhero, and does not hesitate to operate at the edge of risk – or beyond it.
She had a crane parked in front of the Austrian Pavilion, and from its raised arm hangs a great bell. At the opening, the artist performed as its clapper. She hung upside down inside the bell’s bowl. The sound was struck by her naked, swinging body. As far as emblematic images of this edition go, Holzinger’s performance made everything else redundant.
The Austrian does not mince her means. She works with the obscene and with violence, drawing on both the avant-garde tradition and less distinguished sources – circuses, freak shows, pornography. In the performative events she stages, blood flows and unsimulated sexual acts occur. During the premiere weekend of her opera Sancta, staged in Schwerin in 2024, 18 audience members required medical attention for nausea induced by the performance.
In Venice, Holzinger has created something resembling a water park – except that instead of marine creatures, performers serve as the attractions. I didn’t see the full show. The several-hours-long queue defeated me and I had to rely on the accounts and clips of those with more patience, and more nerve, since filming was prohibited inside the Austrian Pavilion.
Fortunately, the centrepiece was visible from outside. At the heart of the exhibition – which Holzinger has named Venice Seaworld – sits an enormous aquarium containing a diving performer, naked save for an oxygen mask. Portable toilets were installed alongside it, with the public invited to use them. There was no shortage of takers – at the biennale, queues form not only for pavilions but for lavatories too. There are too few of them, or rather too many visitors.
But the Austrian artist’s intention was not to accommodate her audience’s needs. The toilets formed an integral element of the aquatic world. The waste produced was continually filtered through a treatment plant built inside the pavilion and filled the glass tank in which the girl with the scuba gear swam. The curatorial note ends with the following sentence: ‘I live in your piss. Whose wet dream is this?’
