
A Summer Color Explosion at Venice Biennale
An Icelandic pavilion of colored hair and thread by Birta Guðjónsdóttir at Shoplifter is this year’s Venice Biennale’s most psychedelic show. For the annual international art exhibition taking place from May 11 to November 24, artists have installed exhibits following an overarching theme titled May You Live In Interesting Times.

This year, the artists took a less direct approach to the subject, truly creating a whole new language. Standout installation”Dear Homo Sapiens” invites the viewer on a sensory journey of emotion. Color has long been used as a therapy since each individual hue has a frequency that resonates with those in the human bodies. It is then that we can actually project our feelings and emotions into colors if we can identify our frequencies. But this exhibit is less individual, and rather an imposed cave of synthetic colored hair offering a cozy and fuzzy embrace.

Shoplifter wanted to demonstrate the correlation between a natural extension of the body: hair, and the impositions from the outside world with the consumption of pop culture. The viewer is then invited to interact with this continuous “contamination” of the two however they please. Her work carries particular humor but also a true sense of natural versus the outside combined in one color tunnel.
Shoplifter is representing Iceland at La Biennale di Venezia in 2019 at the Icelandic Pavilion.