Audun Mortensen: Art as Provocation
– Norway
The writer and artist (born in 1985) is known for his conceptual provocations that push push the boundaries of literature. He retold Nabokov's Lolita backwards, and selected and published all jokes from the work of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. He also published the novel Samleren (The Collector), which he later admitted was created by having another novel, written in English, translated using Google Translate. Although the publisher soon withdrew the book from the market, it was not a typical case of plagiarism, as Mortensen's intention was to stimulate a social discussion. At the Czech festival Fotograf 2013, he had an installation in the Futura gallery. A collection of his selected poems titled Out of Office Reply has been published in Czech. In an interview with the weekly Klassekampen, he stated that he writes for "existentially confused hipsters, depressed gender studies experts, teenagers, freelancers, lonely students and cheerful parents of preschool children". (photo © Heidi Furre)