The Anti-Terror Album is a pop album and an art exhibition. The music and presentation were created in response to ‘KRISØV 2017’ – a document used as a framing narrative for the Danish national crisis management exercise, a major disaster drill for Danish authorities held every two years.

For several years now, Peter Voss-Knude has worked with military issues and Denmark’s contemporary involvement in war, exploring the theme in a field where art, politics and anthropology intersect. As part of this work, he got access to the document he now addresses in music and art.

The narrative in ‘KRISØV 2017’ deals with a series of fictional terrorist attacks perpetrated in North Jutland by Islamic fundamentalists. Over the course of 48 hours, representatives from official authorities such as the Danish National Police, the Danish broadcasting corporation and the Danish government played through the narrative’s plot in real time: a fictional scenario rehearsed and enacted as if it were real. A piece of fiction in which all perpetrators are Muslim or Arab, and any suggestion that terrorist threats might come from other quarters is left out.

‘To my mind, “KRISØV 2017” is highly  problematic. I see the document as a kind of Freudian slip of the Danish psyche. After all, the scenario was not written for the general public, but for internal use by the country’s leaders and authorities, and it provides unique insight into the psychology behind the anxieties and bogeymen at work in our society. The narrative is full of stereotypical terrorist characters and includes some bizarre and inappropriate details that have no place in an emergency drill,’ says Peter Voss-Knude.

With The Anti-Terror Album, Peter Voss-Knude turns the entire concept of anti-terrorism upside down. To him, the real terror is not an external threat. Rather, the terror stems from our own fears and prejudices that are fed by narratives such as ‘KRISØV 2017’. And from the imagined threats that we ourselves build up and manifest, for example in the form of physical anti-terror barriers.

Peter Voss-Knude offers his own take on alternative forms of anti-terror measures. One of the focal points of the exhibition is a 1.1 tonne slab of pink quartz – an anti-terror barrier made out of beautiful pink crystal, protecting its environs against terrorist attacks not just physically, but spiritually too.

The music on The Anti-Terror Album also constitutes a kind of protection against terror and terrorism. ‘If you listen to the music on this record, you’ll be less terrorised,’ says Peter Voss-Knude.

Read more about the exhibition here