DJEVELEN ER EN FALLEN ENGEL

With brutal frankness, Morten Traavik takes to task the innermost essence of aid culture and systematized goodness. Armed with the slogan "Everyone has the right to be beautiful!", the well-meaning Traavik goes to Angola and Cambodia to set up the world's first beauty pageant for women injured by landmines. 

«Miss Landmine» is one of the internationally most controversial art projects of the 2000s. Traavik's political art project created headlines and attention around the globe on a scale that most attitude campaigns, not to mention art projects, can only dream of. At the same time, travelling through countries in Africa and Asia damaged by civil war, his well-meant activism bring him closer to the darker sides of the aid community and his growing doubts about his own motives. 

In his quest to awaken us from our comfortable and self-righteous slumber, Traavik takes on the dark sides of the aid industry populated by war criminals and art critics, prostitutes, ministers and, not least, Kurtz of Joseph Conrad's classic Heart of Darkness.

(Djevelen er en fallen engel, Aschehoug, Norway 2013) First edition published in October 2013.