The Immersive Hairy Worlds of Shoplifter
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hen we connect over Zoom, Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir, aka Shoplifter, is in Bentonville, Arkansas preparing to unveil Xanadu, a large-scale, outdoor installation at Format Festival. “It’s going to be like an alien forest that people at the festival roam around in and space out,” says Arnardóttir of the installation, consisting of ten poles ranging in height from six meters (over nineteen feet) to ten meters (close to thirty-three feet) that were to be covered in multi-colored synthetic hair extensions.
As Shoplifter, hair is Arnardóttir’s calling card and she has built an extensive body of work by braiding and weaving extensions into pieces that blur the line between sculpture and painting. Arnardóttir has created wearable art donned by none other than Björk. She has exhibited with institutions like Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and Kulturhuset Stadsteatern in Sweden. And in 2019 her career-turning, multi-room installation, Chromo Sapiens, made its debut in the Icelandic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. It is now on permanent display at Höfu∂stö∂in, an art center in Reykjavík co-founded by Arnardóttir and business partner Lilja Baldurs.
Originally from Iceland, Arnardóttir has been based in New York since 1994, where she earned her MFA at School of Visual Arts, and it was there that she became intrigued by hair extensions. “I remember when I first bought this hair extension in some dollar shop on 23rd Street in New York,” she recalls, describing it as “such a magnificent and absurd product.”
“There’s this whole business around hair and I’ve always been intrigued by it. I was always doing my friends’ hair when we were going out, when we were teenagers, and experimenting with my own look,” Arnardóttir continues.
Mass production of ridiculous things is fascinating to me, like a banana cutter or these ridiculous, nonsensical objects that are supposed to enrich our lives and make it easier, but it’s just an onslaught of stuff…”
“So I think that my inspiration is human behavior and the positivity of vanity.”
Of the significance of hair, she adds, “We constantly try to tame it and we have to make conscious, creative decisions all the time on what to do with it.” With a background in drawing and painting, Arnardóttir didn’t know just how crucial a role that synthetic hair would play in her art. “I think that hair snuck into the rest of my work. I didn’t realize that it would turn into this,” she says. “I didn’t mean for it to turn into this monstrosity.”
Initially she incorporated brown braids into her pieces. “Instead of drawing on paper, I was just going to use the physical material,” she says. “I started making murals, where I would place the braids and create this drawing with the patterns that are created when you do that.”
In part, Arnardóttir’s choice of material is reflective of her interest in the sheer volume of stuff that exists in this world. “Mass production of ridiculous things is fascinating to me, like a banana cutter or these ridiculous, nonsensical objects that are supposed to enrich our lives and make it easier, but it’s just an onslaught of stuff,” she says. Arnardóttir says that she likes to use materials that already exist in the world, perhaps recontextualizing them in the process. “Sometimes the original purpose is in the foreground, sometimes in the background,” she says.
The evolution of hair extensions in Arnardóttir’s work is an example of that. “Right now, the hair extensions have ceased to be so obviously hair extensions, but in the beginning I was doing braids out of brown hair extensions so that was referencing humans in that product,” she says. “Now, it’s become this onslaught of colors, texture and, frankly, a huge, analog, three-dimensional landscape painting in a way.”
I can make my own colors and it’s a richer color because when you come up close, you can see the different colors.”
In 2012, Arnardóttir created Nervescape, a site-specific installation for Clocktower Gallery in New York, that would alter her practice. Following that exhibition, museums across the world reached out for site-specific Shoplifter installations. She has made ten variations of Nervescape in the decade since that installation debuted.
In Shoplifter installations, hair provides the color and texture for environments that often look like landscapes from other worlds with brightly colored extensions pulled together into shapes that resemble plant life and rock formations.
Though Arnardóttir can order extensions in virtually any color she needs, she blends strands of hair together to create new colors. “I take royal blue and mix it with neon yellow and I get this crazy green color,” she explains. “I pluck it through, mash it with a tiny little crochet needle, also a reference to having your highlights in the ‘80s,” she explains.
It’s a process that’s also similar to mixing paints. “I started to really paint with it because I create the new shades myself by using the solid colors that I have,” she says. “I can make my own colors and it’s a richer color, because when you come up close, you can see the different colors.”
The process is labor intensive and time consuming, particularly considering the amount of installations Arnardóttir creates. In 2016, she started making two a year. Three years later, she had installations in Milan and Helsinki, in addition to her work for the Venice Biennale. Now she’s averaging two or three installations a year. With all those projects, Arnardóttir works with assistants who help braid and blend the extensions. “It would be impossible for me to create four thousand square feet of hair surface for these installations—three thousand square feet, four thousand square feet surface of hair—without help. So, I had to become really good at delegating some of the work,” she says.
But there is a drawback for Arnardóttir. “I started doing it because it was meditative, but a lot of the meditative process is now in the hands of assistants,” she says.
To date, the best known Shoplifter installation is Chromo Sapiens. A multi-sensory, 360-degree installation that fills three rooms, it was initially created for the Icelandic Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. “I delivered exactly what I wanted to deliver and exactly what I envisioned, because I had been working with this material for so long and we collaborate so well at this point,” she says. “It does everything that I want it to do. I’ve become a master hair-tamer. Taming the beast.”
I read a lot about neuroscience and the nervous system and the organic shapes of that is also similar to the fibers… It’s fibers that are like trees inside our bodies.”
Amongst her goals for the installation was mimicking the experience of entering the chambers of a cave, but her inspirations also include color, sound, and the similarities between the materials used in the work and the composition of the human body. “I read a lot about neuroscience and the nervous system; and the organic shapes of those are also similar to the fibers,” she says. “It’s fibers that are like trees inside our bodies.”
Icelandic band HAM made the installation’s soundscape. “It’s less about listening to the soundscape and more about feeling the sound waves and creating an atmosphere that has to do with time, breath, and movement,” Arnardóttir explains.
Color is a crucial component of the installation. Arnardóttir appreciated that the bright colors improved her own mental well-being and realized that the installation’s title could actually refer to the viewers. “You go in as a homo sapien and come out as a chromo sapien,” she says. “Creating a new being with a heightened awareness of the importance and the affect that colors can have on you in a positive manner.”
Chromo Sapiens appeared in Iceland in early 2020 briefly, as the exhibition closed with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, Arnardóttir was in Iceland working on a commission and came across two barracks that were the perfect size to house the installation. She talked to her business partner about creating a permanent space for the work.
“This type of art work, I think, is capable of being installed for a long period of time and attracting people continuously,” she says. “If it stops, then I will take it down and do something else or invite some other artists to do something there or create another long-term installation.”
Arnardóttir also knew that the artwork should live in Iceland, since it was made for the Icelandic Pavilion and represents a significant moment in her career. “Instead of traveling with it, let people travel to it,” she says.
All this led to Höfu∂stö∂in in early 2022, an event that made Arnardóttir the first woman in Iceland to open a center dedicated to her own artwork. The space solves several issues that comes with making large-scale art as well. Installations as large as Shoplifter pieces require a lot of storage space. “Putting a solid ground and a roof over the head of this work was very important for me and not having it in a forty-foot container at the harbor in the dark,” Arnardóttir explains.
On top of that, shipping something like Chromo Sapiens across the globe and then reconfiguring it to meet the specifications of new venues creates a host of other logistical challenges. It was a practical move that also makes the installation available for people whenever they are in Reykjavík and enables them to connect with each other through the art. Says Arnardóttir, “I feel like it brings people together.”
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Shoplifter recently brought her hair-based art to Venice Biennale, creating an immersive cave installation out of the cascading layers of hues and unsettling textures. The Icelandic artist, whose real name is Hrafnhildur Arnardottir, has long used both real and fake hair to create her massive works.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.