Shoplifter is the Icelandic artist bringing camp hair art to the Venice Biennale

If this is the year of camp, then Icelandic artist Hrafnhildur “Shoplifter” Arnardóttir is its perfect representative at the 58th Venice Biennale, opening this week. The art world’s favourite hair-enthusiast has converted the Nordic island’s pavilion into one exuberant, colourful, fluffy immersive installation — very much at the image of its creator.

“I immediately knew that I wanted to cover the pavilion entirely with hair,” Shoplifter told me when I visited the space during the instalment. In a warehouse on the island of Giudecca, a shipping container worth of synthetic hair is being combed, braided and prepped by a herd of dedicated assistants and family members, all donning variations of the same tie-dye outfit. “I just wanted it to be over-the-top,” the artist continues. Titled Chromo Sapiens, the installation is a like a cavernous journey of colour combinations which bring visitors through “this other wordly, alien landscape,” she says. It is divided into different three different sections — progressing from darker tones to euphoric colours and soft pastels — all named more fabulously than the other (my favourite is ‘Opium Natura’). It comes complete with a soundscape composed by Icelandic cult metal band HAM (‘animal fur’ in Icelandic), emanating from the work through a 24-channel surround system.

Originally from Reykjavik, Shoplifter (a nickname she adopted when she realised New Yorkers couldn’t pronounce her birth name, after she relocated in the early 1990s) made a name for herself with her primal-yet-sophisticated hair-based installations, often bridging the worlds of art and fashion while collaborating with everyone from Björk to Moncler. Human hair, synthetic hair, fiber hair; you name it, she’ll have it. “I’m trying to collaborate with this material and make it work with me on becoming something else,” she says. “I’m imitating nature but on some kind of hyper coloured way.” Like a hymn to Susan Sontag’s observations on camp, exaggeration is key. “It’s cartoonish, it’s childish, it’s playful, it’s mossy, it’s beautiful, it’s grotesque; it’s all kinds of things.”

The artist’s fascination with hair started at a young age, when she found her grandmother’s cut-off braid, stored in a drawer, like the remnant of her lost youth. “It was morbid and eerie but beautiful,” remembers the artist. Little did she know then that the fiber would once become her artistic signature. And while early experimentations focused on human hair of a dark complexion, in recent years, the most synthetic and colourful, the better. “I wanted to bring colour into my work, because I consider colour such a big part of who I am,” explains the artist, who has developed a side practice as a neuroscience nerd, studying anything that relates to our perception of colour. “I started working with these kind of Halloween-like, low-quality hair, and it kind of resembled wool,” she says of the mass produced material. “I’m fascinated with this pop culture element and I consider my work more like textile pop art.”

Indeed, wool plays a central role in the history of Iceland. When Norse settlers first arrived to the nordic island circa 870 AD, they brought with them domestic sheep, providing Icelanders not only with food but also wool to endure harsh climate conditions. Still to this day, the island of 350,000 is famously home to twice as many sheep than humans, continuing to fuel the country’s rich tradition of craft. “In Scandinavia, the textile heritage up until now has been considered this kind of lower art, something inferior to patriarch painting trends and sculptures,” the artist says, also pointing to the reclaiming of crafts in 1970s feminist art movements, led by the L.A. Woman’s Building. “My work is like macho textiles, because when I’m making my wall murals, I have a pneumatic staple gun and heavy metal music in my ears and I’m attacking the wall with these colourful, cutesy fibres; but it’s like really physical, it’s like boxing almost,” she laughs.

In addition to her participation this year’s Venice Biennale, Shoplifter currently has a solo exhibition at Kiasma in Helsinki, part of the Finnish National Gallery, and recently completed a collaboration with Italian apparel brand Moncler for their Genius project, presented at the latest Milan Fashion Week. “I like allowing myself to bring my work into different contexts,” she says of her involvement in the fashion industry, which also includes a collection in collaboration with & Other Stories. “Also, I just want to communicate to more people from different disciplines, and I feel like my work is escaping the holiness of the museum and the gallery in order to be a part of everyday life.”

During our interview, we are interrupted by a phone call from the artist’s hair provider in New York. Shoplifter claims to be her biggest customer; unsurprisingly. “When I show up she throws out everyone and closes the shop,” the artist jokes. Now, from China to sinking Venice via New York, is moving masses of industrially-produced synthetic fibre across oceans a reasonable practice in our current environmental crisis? “I recycle, I barely throw out a hairball,” affirms Shoplifter. “It can be taken apart and reassembled in a totally different way,” she says of her site-specific installations (the Venice project is due to travel to the Reykjavik Museum sometime in the new year).

Are visitors allowed to touch the art? “People are welcome to pat it like an old shy Mammoth,” the artist jokes. Of course, she wouldn’t want it any other way. “My work is always inspired by humans,” she continues. “Human behaviour, who we are, the philosophy of human existence. Maybe that’s why I like the name ‘chromo-sapiens’; it means colour awareness.”