Florentina Holzinger
Bergen Kunsthall, Norway
24 August 2024
Bergen Kunsthall is the largest contemporary art centre in Norway and a hub for the art scene in Scandinavia, functioning as both an exhibition space and performance venue with more than 200 events and 12 exhibitions a year. As part of their 2024 programme, the institution presented a new large-scale commission by artist and choreographer Florentina Holzinger. Holzinger works across artistic disciplines and has produced extensive and widely discussed theatre productions. Since 2020, Holzinger and her team have been arranging experiments in public spaces, creating compositions between bodies, sound and architecture. Under the title “Études”, these one-time performances take place on lakes, parking lots, streets, and public squares.
According to Frederic Chopin, “an etude is a musical composition of considerable difficulty, designed to provide practice material for an instrument and its player.” Yet, they are designed to “always please the audience in concert.”
In her artistic practice Holzinger brings together live musical elements, performative gestures, and stunts—an extreme form of physical activity that requires precise, technical training. She sees all her work to date as a continuous examination of her own body: to experience and train it, to stand up for itself. Holzinger’s work continuously pushes the boundaries of performance styles, moving between pop references and high culture, classical dance references and circus shows.
For the work in Bergen, Florentina Holzinger and her team expanded their research and interest in the element of water. For this commission, they explored different modes of human representation and the potential of different bodies and forms of physicality, constantly working to expand the limits and capabilities of the human body.
Water is the element of adaptability; its capacity to expand and shift state symbolises an endless, eternal, undissolvable unity with the outside world. Iconographically, water was often associated with femininity—from nymphs and sirens to female bodies depicted with a fishtail symbolising their deprived sexuality. Globally today, we witness a shortage of drinking water on the one hand and rising sea levels with subsequent flooding on the other. Is it possible to escape the precarious circumstances of our present day, characterised by climate catastrophe scenarios, through training?
How machines can co-exist with dancers in a choreography—hybrids of human body and machine—is a leading question for Holzinger. A blurring of flesh and prosthesis has occurred time and time again in previous works, in the form of stunt devices, training aids, or motorised vehicles. In her most toured work “Tanz”, the performers fly through the air on motorcycles—perhaps the equivalent of the contemporary broomstick. This use of external machines and devices to train the human body repeatedly alludes to Holzinger’s constant attempt to expand the physical possibilities of the performers.
Florentina Holzinger (born 1986 in Vienna) is an internationally acclaimed performance artist and choreographer. Following her studies in Amsterdam, her graduation project Silk was presented at Impulstanz in Vienna in 2012, where it was awarded the Prix Jardin d'Europe. Since 2020, she and her team have presented a series of large-scale musical-performative experiments in public space, from lakes and parking decks to streets and public squares. Her performances incorporate elements of classical ballet, acrobatics, combat sport and horror, blurring the lines between high and low culture. They very often include an extreme form of physical activity that requires precise, technical training. Holzinger has received numerous accolades, including an invitation to the Theatertreffen in Berlin in 2020, the Outstanding Artist Award for Performance, and the Nestroy Theater Prize in the Director category. In summer 2023, she presented a large-scale performance at the Olympic stadium in Berlin.
This was the artist's first collaboration with Phileas.
