Hika Ingebørg Kierkenupp Visits

Hika Ingebørg Kierkenupp, body piercer and self-described cyborgmaker will be a guest at Infinite Body Piercing from Friday, July 15 through Sunday, July 17. Hika is from Berlin, and will be traveling through the United States on her way to the annual Association of Professional Piercers Conference and Exposition in Las Vegas the last week in July. She’ll be here for the weekend, following our piercers around and seeing how we do things here in Philly.

Hika writes, “I consider myself a feminist and philosopher, and live vegetarian (mostly vegan). I basically spend most of my free time baking cookies while listening to audiobooks and speeches—all while trying to keep my cats from doing a mess with the rest of the house. Oh. And horror movies; if people want to get distracted from their nervousness before piercing, just get me started on talking about splatter films—and I won’t ever stop! I even wrote a paper on the depiction of the 21st century through the topic of the epidemic zombie!” Hika recently completed a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and literature, so there are plenty of topics she can cover while making you feel comfortable during your piercing.

Hika has been piercing for six years, and has been working in a high-volume shop for the last three years. She “loves to rock gold, microdermals and genital piercings, but I am also a big fan of projects with multiple piercings.” As of this past Christmas, she has stopped working in a regular shop and decided to only travel to different studios, and to spend her days off with educating herself in different fields. Always pursuing education, she has attended the BMX.net conference for the last five years, and 2016 will be the third year in a row she will have attended the annual APP Conference and Expo. You can see some of her work on her Tumblr, Instagram, and Facebook pages,

Lastly, Hika is also a prolific performance artist, “doing performances with freak shows, hooks and a lot of needles.” She will be visiting several different cities while she is in the States this summer, but she is will only be with us for a weekend. Even with such a short visit, we’re still incredibly excited to be hosting her.