Adding a whole new meaning to the word “hipster,” a Norwegian conceptual artist has eaten his own hip on “a whim” and said it tasted like “wild sheep.”
25-year-old Alexander Selvik Wengshoel was born with a deformed hip that was replaced just a few years ago after he spent much of his life on crutches or in a wheelchair, Norway’s The Local reports.
The bone, and the video footage of his hip replacement operation, are now on display in his graduate show exhibition at Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art, where he revealed the story behind his project.
“I had to boil off the meat to get to the bone, and when I started scraping off the meat, I took a little piece and thought, ‘Why not do it?'” he told The Local. “It’s not every day I will have a piece of human flesh which is mine and which it is possible to eat. So I had a little taste, and then I thought, ‘That’s really nice.'”
Wengshoel washed down his meal of hip bone and potato gratin with a glass of wine while his girlfriend was at work. Although there was little meat on the bone, it was enough to make an appetizer, he said. “It had this flavour of wild sheep, if you take a sheep that goes in the mountains and eats mushrooms. It was goaty.”
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Write to Nolan Feeney at nolan.feeney@time.com