In recent years, Austrian choreographer, dramaturge, dancer, and performance artist Florentina Holzinger has become one of the most celebrated artists in the German speaking world. Her works including Ophelia’s Got Talent (2022) and Sancta (2024) have received awards and praise from art and theater critics, scholars, and festival organizers. Combining dance, body art, theater, and opera, Holzinger’s unique genre of performance art will represent Austria at the 2026 Venice Biennale, further establishing its significance in the arena of the visual arts.
Holzinger’s work is characterized by deep investigations of theater and dance conventions of the past. What makes her work of particular interest to the present is its provocative integration of full-on spectacle with thorough-going critiques of fine art iconographies and forms. Holzinger is clearly indebted to specifically Austrian traditions in the visual arts and theater, as well as Austrian cultures of abjection, misogyny, and xenophobia. Echoes of VALIE EXPORT and Elfriede Jelinek traverse her work, and Holzinger herself makes repeated reference to Viennese Actionism. For this panel, we invite contributions that focus on aspects and motifs of Holzinger’s work like spectacle, audience participation, and the ethics of spectatorship; the violence implicit in the “beauty” of high art; acts of freedom often seen as “self-harm” (and therefore prompting rampant trigger warnings); the critical juxtaposition of popular theater forms (“freakshow,” stunting, spectacle) with fine art traditions; intense demands on the staging infrastructures of theater institutions; the intractability of feminist practice in the present. We also invite papers that shed light on the artistic training and treatment of the body that Holzinger persistently returns to and reinvents. Our goal for this panel is to initiate scholarly engagement with Florentina Holzinger in the North American context and to revisit some of the key traditions of radical art, literature, and theater in the Austrian context that are definitive of her work’s international scope, as its recent global success exemplifies.
Please send abstracts (250-350 words) and a short biographical statement to the conveners by March 28, 2025:
Teresa Kovacs, IU, tekovacs@iu.edu
Caroline Lillian Schopp, JHU, cschopp2@jhu.edu