As golden hour descended over the Austrian countryside, several dozen people gathered on the edge of a cornfield to watch a paraglider wearing a bird costume head soar down from the sky. Kicking up dust, the performer, Fibi Eyewalker, landed and skidded to a halt. After a quick exchange with her tandem pilot, Eyewalker pulled down her white jumpsuit, revealing her naked, tattooed body, and crouched over the dirt.
“Peace on earth!” Eyewalker shouted toward the crowd as she urinated.
Task completed, Eyewalker led the crowd into the courtyard of an 18th-century castle belonging to Rita Nitsch, the widow of one of Austria’s best known performance artists, Hermann Nitsch. There, Eyewalker climbed on top of a truck and swallowed a sword.
In most circumstances, such spectacles would seem like singular events. But this was “Pentecost Play,” a 9-hour, one-time performance created by Florentina Holzinger, who was also a performer on Saturday among a cast and crew of 58. And Eyewalker’s descent was just one of the warm-up acts.
The Viennese-born Holzinger has made a name for herself in recent years as a choreographer, director and performance artist who pushes boundaries with shows that feature self-harm, live piercings, violence, nudity, and bodily fluids like urine and blood.
People tend to love or hate Holzinger’s work; sometimes, they feel both at once. Though she is controversial, her shows have been produced by major institutions, and she is currently representing Austria at the Venice Biennale. Her presentation “Seaworld Venice,” which she created for the Austria Pavilion, was one of the Biennale’s most talked-about exhibitions during the preview week earlier this month. (It will come to Amant, a nonprofit cultural space in Brooklyn, in 2028.)
“Pentecost Play” is a companion piece to the Venice show that Holzinger made with the Wiener Festwochen arts festival and the Nitsch Foundation. Nitsch, who died in 2022, was one of a group of Austrian artists known as the Actionists that created radical performance art starting in the 1960s. The Actionists’ work was partially a response to the stifling atmosphere of their country after World War II, when society and the government tried to bury Austria’s alliance with Nazi Germany and its role in the war’s atrocities.
“Actionism was so graphic and violent and loud and noisy because there was strong desire to break this blanket of silence,” Holzinger said during a call from Melbourne, Australia, where she flew after Saturday’s performance for a run of her stage work “A Year Without Summer.” “Conceptually, I can totally relate to this,” she added. “It’s important to be sometimes radical in statements, to use art as a power, as a tool, against things you’re not OK with.”
The “Pentecost Play” performance began in Vienna, hours before the paraglider’s descent in the countryside about an hour from the capital. (The audience was shuttled between locations via buses.)
As the afternoon sun blazed, several naked women, including a pregnant one, walked onto the bare cement in front of the Vienna Ice-Skating Club and played harps while the audience watched.
“I hope they wore sunscreen,” a woman in the audience murmured.
Gasps and nudges spread through the crowd, and phone cameras swung upward when, at least a dozen stories above, on the roof of the InterContinental hotel, Bláthin Eckhardt, a performer clad in nothing but a harness, hovered at the edge. After a few beats, she began a slow walk down the building’s facade.
Meanwhile, back on the ground level, Holzinger appeared, riding with several other performers in a black car. Soon, the car was spinning in circles on wet cement — a nod, perhaps, to a jet ski circling a makeshift pool in the Venice Biennale show — and a naked Holzinger was standing on the roof, clutching a rope as she commanded the car like a modern-day horse-drawn chariot.
After the Vienna portion of the show concluded, 10 charter buses transported about 700 spectators to the Prinzendorf Castle in the heart of Austria’s wine country.
The castle was a key performance space for Nitsch’s “actions,” which included dozens of ritualistic, pagan- and Roman Catholicism-inspired performances across many decades.
During the six hours of Holzinger’s performance at the castle, spectacles arrived one after the other: a monster truck running over another vehicle and destroying it, a woman hanging from a window in a harness and banging against a metal sheet in a frenzy, performers piercing each others’ backs and legs with thick metal clips. (The participants were female-identifying and nonbinary people.)
Rita Nitsch said in an interview that Holzinger “provokes our bourgeois sentiments.” Her nephew and the board director of the Nitsch Foundation, Paul Breitenfelder, added that Holzinger “shows things that happen in society that we don’t really want to look at. Nitsch also showed brutality, violence, some of the things of life that are often hidden.”
Both Nitsch and Holzinger also explored pain through their work, according to Julia Moebus-Puck, the director of the Vienna Actionism Museum. Each artist posed questions like “What is pain? How is pain manifested in our society? Where is the limit of pain?” Moebus-Puck said.
She added that people have been drawn to performing artists like Holzinger in the post-Covid-19 world. “We were not allowed to touch anybody,” Moebus-Puck said. “And now we want to go back to corporeal things, to touch things, to feel things.”
Artists have long used their own bodies as tools and weapons in punishing performance pieces, from Chris Burden, who invited a friend to shoot him in the arm in a California gallery in 1971, to Marina Abramovic, the Serbian conceptual artist.
Fatima Hellberg, the director general of the Mumock Museum of Modern Art in Vienna said she saw links between Holzinger’s work and that of Abramovic, whose six-hour piece, “Rhythm 0,” involved placing 69 objects, including a gun, a bullet, an ax and knives, on a table and inviting the audience to use them on her however they wanted.
A work like Holzinger’s “confronts people with the limits of ethics, the limits of their perception of self,” Hellberg said. “Those kinds of moments in Abramovic’s work are also really instructive to understand the figure of pain in Holzinger’s work,” she added.
Hellberg pointed to the artist Gina Pane climbing a spiked ladder on her hands and knees until she was too injured to continue, in the 1970s, and Ana Mendieta’s 1972 series “Untitled (Glass On Body Imprints)” which documented the artist pressing herself onto panes of glass that distorted her body.
“We’re quite obsessed with our bodies, and modification through various supplements, but also through surgery, fillers, Botox, whatever it might be,” Hellberg added, noting the “return to the body as a site for performance and as a material.”
The self-harm that Holzinger’s shows feature has caused distress and disgust; some audience members required first-aid treatment for severe nausea after performances in Stuttgart, Germany, according to a theater there.
But Holzinger pointed out that some examples of self-inflicted pain, like cosmetic surgeries, are a “type of violence that’s culturally accepted: the one to optimize your body and the one that’s seen as productive.”
“Nobody would call Kim Kardashian a pain artist even though she for sure is as well,” Holzinger said.
Holzinger said that her performers were mostly nude because she wanted to normalize the bare body and “the right to be naked without being sexualized,.” When images and videos of her performances circulate on social media, as they have done after the Venice performance, the blowback can be swift, she said.
“It immediately turns into these threats of violence against us,” Holzinger said.
Those threats are a reminder of why she does her work, she added.
After the sun set on Saturday, performers playing musical instruments led a candlelit procession up the dirt road from the castle’s gate to the courtyard. There, the audience fidgeted as the crew and performers set up the final tableau of the show: a last supper scene.
A long table rose several feet from the ground, suspended by metal chains. Thirteen women followed, pulled into the air by ropes attached to the metal clips that they had pierced into each other’s bodies earlier.
For the first time all day, the phones disappeared, the music had stopped and the audience was silent.
The first time Holzinger hung this way, she said in the interview, she thought her skin could rip.
“I cannot do this, my body cannot do this, and then you do it and then all of a sudden you’re hanging in your own body,” she recalled thinking.
Yet the feeling was “amazing,” she added. By now, Holzinger has hung this way at least a couple dozen times, she said, and is used to the pain.
Watching from below as she and the other performers swung above us, I believed her. What was impossible to transmit through clips on Instagram or images online was the camaraderie of the performers, the gleeful shouts, the exclamations of wonder.
“We’re all up here together!” a dangling cast member shouted.
“We do what people perceive as cruel things to our bodies, but the bottom line is that we’re in charge of it,” Holzinger said. “People are shocked by seeing women who are in control of themselves, but they’re not shocked by reading about femicides around the globe. That violence is something we’re used to.”
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