Forget Venice, it's all about NYC this week

We didn’t go to Venice this year, but the Austrian pavilion seemed to be all that anyone was talking about on their return from the sinking city. That, and the rain.

Titled Seaworld Venice, the pavilion was taken over by performance artist Florentina Holzinger, whose gallery Thaddaeus Ropac describes her practice as a combination of “extreme physicality with theatrical precision to probe the limits of corporeal agency.” A fitting description for a pavilion that saw performers hanging 50ft in the air above the entrance, topless and upside down, slamming from side to side within a large bell, silently sounding the alarm to the harmful, cyclical nature of human consumption, waste and pollution. These warnings came to fruition within the walls too with an installation that saw more naked performers endlessly circle a small pool on a jet ski, and in another room, visitors were invited to urinate into a toilet, with the liquid then passing through a purification system before entering a tank where a performer floated.

The works apparently caused enough of a stir for Holzinger’s Instagram account to be temporarily suspended by Meta.

Moving on from Venice, this week the art world is hoping on a plane over the Atlantic to New York, where there’s not one but two major art fairs are opening as well as a slew of high profile auctions.