Chromo Sapiens

The Icelandic Art Center is proud to announce that Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir / Shoplifter will represent Iceland at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. The Icelandic Pavilion will be curated by Birta Guðjónsdóttir. Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir / Shoplifter joins a list of Iceland’s most notable artists, including Ragnar Kjartansson, Steina Vasulka and Egill Sæbjörnsson, to represent Iceland at the Venice Biennale. The selection process began with an open call, and according to the international jury: “the proposal submitted by artist Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir / Shoplifter and curator Birta Guðjónsdóttir, respectively, who together have envisioned a large-scale, interdisciplinary and multisensory installation. After careful and meticulous review of many excellent proposals in this year’s field, it was determined their concept best fulfills the requirement of a successful Pavilion of Iceland at the Venice Biennale.” Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir / Shoplifter and Birta Guðjónsdóttir have previously collaborated on three of Shoplifter’s large solo commissioned projects: Nervescape III at the Havremagasinet Cultural Center in Boden, Sweden (2012); Nervescape IV at Momentum 8 – Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art in Moss, Norway (2015) and Nervescape VII at the National Gallery of Iceland in Reykjavík (2017). Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir / Shoplifter notes: “It is with great excitement that I accept the challenge to represent Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 2019. I intend to engulf the viewer with my signature medium, synthetic hair fibres, which will undoubtedly tickle the visitor on many levels. The texture and colours will swirl and creep around the interior of Spazio Punch, the location of the Icelandic Pavilion in Giudecca, creating cavernous dwellings that stimulate the visitor´s senses with trembling subterra sound waves, screamingly bright colours, subdued surfaces and irresistible textures. I have commissioned my contemporaries, the legendary and notorious Icelandic metal band HAM, to compose an opus as part of the artwork that aims to massage your organs while you roam around the operatic and manic visual stimulation of various fuzzy chambers that make up the installation.” Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir / Shoplifter (b. 1969) is an Icelandic artist who has been based in New York since 1994. For the past 15 years, she has explored extensively the use and symbolic nature of hair and its visual and artistic potential. Working with synthetic and natural hair, she has created sculptures and wall murals, ranging from decorative and beautiful to haunting and horrific, to strictly abstract geometry looking human hair murals and site-specific installations. Shoplifter´s art addresses the history of our obsession with hair and how it is an ongoing manifestation of creativity in contemporary culture. Her body of work largely consists of sculptures, site-specific installations and wall murals and is anchored in a fascination with pop culture and mass production as well as folk art and handcrafts, which continue to strongly influence her creative process. Her body of work as a whole exists in the shocking pink area between visual art, performance, and design. Shoplifter´s artwork has the ability to address a variety of elements that make up the general human agenda, from bodily and existential obsession with beautification as well as the forever lurking obsession with the grotesque and fetish. She creates work with several overlaps between many fields in her creative process, from fashion to fiction to furry action to tactile friction. Shoplifter’s installations evoke the desire to return to nature in a modern culture where we are drowning in artificial matter. Or perhaps, rather to create virtual reality, in analog – artificial nature. A few of Shoplifter’s major projects are a window installation commissioned by MoMA in New York 2008, together with the art collective a.v.a.f., Liverpool Biennial in UK in September 2010. The headpiece she created for Björk on her album cover of Medúlla in 2004 was presented at the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, in New York as a part of the Björk retrospective in 2015. In 2011 Shoplifter received The Nordic Award in Textiles with a large solo exhibition at the Textile Museum of Borås, Sweden. That same year she was awarded The Prince Eugen Medal for artistic achievement from the King and Royal Crown of Sweden. Birta Guðjónsdóttir (b. 1977), is an Icelandic curator. She currently holds the position of chief curator at the National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavík. In 2015 she co-curated Momentum 8 – Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art, Norway. She was a guest curator of the Nordic Art Triennial at Eskilstuna Art Museum, Sweden in 2013 and the director of The Living Art Museum, Reykjavík in 2009-11. She was the artistic director of exhibition space 101 Projects, Reykjavík, curator’s assistant at MuHKA; Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium. She took part in the Nordic Baltic Curatorial Platform, initiated by FRAME, Finland and has worked as a curator at SAFN, Private Contemporary Art Collection, Reykjavík. Guðjónsdóttir has independently curated over twenty exhibitions in Basel, Berlin, Boden, Copenhagen, Oslo, Melbourne, New York, St. Petersburg and most art museums and art spaces in Iceland. She participated in the Curatorial Intensive program of ICI; Independent Curators International, New York. In the same year she participated in The Cornwall Workshop, organized by Tate Museum, St. Ives. Guðjónsdóttir worked as an assistant to artist Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Iceland’s representative at the Venice Biennale 2005.

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Spazio Punch, Giudecca 800

Venice, NY