Notes on Swimming Pools

an ongoing Artistic Research by Josef Ka

The swimming pool is not my subject. It has become my medium.

I am obsessed with swimming pools.

Not with swimming, but with the architecture of contained water. Water disciplined by geometry. Water inside a rectangle.

I don’t like swimming.

I am interested in what remains when the water is gone.

An empty swimming pool becomes an inverted theatre, an archaeological site, a temporary landscape where gravity is exposed.

For more than fifteen years I have returned to swimming pools as places to think through performance, sound, painting, and time. What began as an isolated gesture has gradually evolved into an ongoing artistic research.

One of the earliest works took place in Moscow, where I created a tribute to Alexander Vertinsky by swimming and singing simultaneously. The pool became both a stage and a musical score, where movement through water transformed the voice and the body.

In 2016, I performed in an abandonned public swimming pool in Serbia. Ten years later, in 2026, I returned to exactly the same pool. Revisiting the site after a decade shifted the work from a performance in space to a performance of time. The pool had changed, I had changed, and the return itself became the artwork.

In 2020, at Kunstraum EWIGKEITSGASSE in Vienna, I celebrated my birthday with a performance in which the stage itself was a plastic swimming pool. Detached from its usual function, the swimming pool became a portable theatre—a symbolic vessel rather than a place for swimming.

Also since 2021, together with Walter Ulreich , I have developed an ongoing series of performances in empty swimming pools across Austria. In these works, the absence of water becomes the material itself. I float without floating, negotiate gravity instead of buoyancy, fall in love with bicycles, play the fool, and allow architecture to become my collaborator. The drained swimming pool transforms into an acoustic chamber, a sculptural object, and an impossible landscape.

In 2023, during a festival in Siracusa, Sicily, I performed inside a swimming pool while a musician Corrado Fusco remained on the shore. The work unfolded as a dialogue across distance, with water functioning as both connector and barrier between two performers.

In the spring of 2026, together with the avant-garde composer Gérard Pape, I created a musical étude in one of the abandoned empty swimming pools near Paris. Without water, the basin revealed its own voice. Its concrete geometry shaped resonance and silence, turning architecture itself into an instrument.

In the summer of 2026, I created *Beautiful Drowned Ones*, a series of paintings conceived specifically for exhibition inside a swimming pool filled with water in Hinterbrühl, Austria. The works were designed to be experienced beneath the water’s surface rather than beside it. Here, the swimming pool ceased to function as a stage for the body and became a space for painting, where light, refraction, and immersion formed part of the work itself.

Today, this body of work includes more than ten performances and related projects in swimming pools across Europe. Some take place underwater, others in empty basins, others in temporary plastic pools. Together they form a single, evolving artistic investigation.

For me, the swimming pool is a paradoxical space. It is designed for movement but defined by strict geometry; associated with freedom yet governed by rules; built for the body while simultaneously disciplining it.

I think of the swimming pool as a heterotopia in Michel Foucault’s sense: a space separated from everyday life, governed by its own rituals and internal logic. Whether filled with water or emptied, it rearranges our relationship to the body, architecture, time, and one another.

I do not use swimming pools as backgrounds. I collaborate with them. Every pool has its own acoustics, history, scars, and social memory. Every work becomes a site-specific conversation with that particular architecture.

This research continues to evolve through new collaborations and new encounters with swimming pools across Europe.

Several video documentations of this ongoing body of work will be published in the near future.

# image by Josef Ka