About Jette Hye Jin Mortensen

- Questions regarding identity production and cultural performativity are central in the works of J.H.J. Mortensen. In complex, formally challenging projects, we are invited into performative experiments and multi-spectered meditations on ideological frameworks, unconscious models of representation, psychology, communication and power.

By creating ruptures of protagonists and splintered identification, J.H.J. Mortensen´s autobiography is opened up as artistic material, and herself as performative, corporeal site for gestural drama.Text and manuscripts often surrounds the works, displayed alongside the actual projects as a reminder of the “hidden text”: the ideological, cultural web that surrounds any work of art.

In recent projects, J.H.J. Mortensen has specifically worked with performative, durational projects where she transfers and distributes her identity or autonomy to groups of performers/collaborators, at the same time revealing and distorting the institutional need for individual identification and representation.

Influenced by experimental theatre, Brecht and Grotowski, strong references to [and critiques of] cultural production modes of tv, film, theater and even industrial time, is ever present. The last one, often contested by a meditation bell, “the bell of time”, suggests our addiction to industrial time as violent. One can perceive her installations and performative spaces as meditations on culture as condition - activated through J.H.J. Mortensen as material, or idea, molded by the invitation of additional, collective imagination.

Background
Jette Hye Jin Mortensen was born in 1980 in Seoul, South Korea and adopted to Denmark New Years eve 1982. Later, she found her Korean family in 2006 and learned about her early history. In 3 different versions. Maybe this ambivalent, complicated background has been the foundation for the need to question, to investigate and express visions from this peculiar position as a nameless vessel that drifts back and forth, unsettled and curious.

Work & Education Bio
Currently lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. MFA and BFA graduate from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Denmark.
Co-founder and member of artgroup UFOlab - Unidentified Foreign Object Laboratory since 2004.
Trained in classical and modern piano and singing and have worked professionally as a singer and backing singer in many contexts.
Studies and experience in animation, performance, scenography and anthropological theatre at the Odin Theatre, ISTA, and acting, stanislavskij technique and filmproduction at The Drama and Film School in Broendbyoester. Master Class in Storytelling and Production w/ Elliot Grove/Raindance Film Festival and documentary filmmaking at Dox Connected/The Danish Filmworkshop. Works as a freelance director, editor and producer and owns the filmproduction company BamBoo Film. Currently directing the feature documentary Adopnation, supported by The Danish Filminstitute, DOX Connected.