Morten Traavik

Morten Traavik is a Norwegian artist and director.

Morten Traavik was born in 1971 in Norway. At school he learned Russian. As an alternative form of military service, he worked in a theater in the north, in Kautokeino. He was among the first foreigners to visit Russia in the 1990s: he organized theater tours in Murmansk and Yakutia, and in 1993 studied directing at GITIS in the workshop of Pyotr Fomenko. In Traavik’s work, “the distinction between art, activism, and social issues is blurred.” Thus, he held beauty contests among landmine victims (in 2008 in Angola, in 2009 in Cambodia) and traveled to North Korea more than twenty times with a “cultural invasion.” His first project in the DPRK was the photo series “Discocracy.” In 2015, he organized the first rock concert in the country’s history and made the documentary film “The Day of Independence” about the adventures of the Slovenian band Laibach. In an interview with Forbes, Traavik admitted:

I have always been attracted to utopias in my work. And one of the constituent parts of utopia is that it always fails… I tried to understand the mentality of people who lived in totalitarian societies — they seemed like aliens compared with us, naive Scandinavians. And then I suddenly realized for myself that getting into North Korea was much easier than I thought.