IN ARTREVIEW

IN FRIEZE

[…] the voices of war are usually not audible at art festivals. But there is Peter Voss-Knude, barefoot at Denmark’s National Gallery with his band Peter & The Danish Defence. ‘I love a man when he’s next to me,’ he sings in jazzy pop vocals, ‘when he’s got more scars than me.’ This music-and-art project, which culminated in an exhibition at the Overgaden Institute of Art this summer, is the result of two years of fieldwork, during which Voss-Knude collected stories from Danish soldiers once stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The voice that sings is neither him, nor the soldiers, but an amalgamation of the two, Voss-Knude tells me when we meet up in a Nørrebro bar. It’s an odd couple: a gay, military- and masculinity-critical artist and young army recruits, but somehow they sing in harmony. The chopper still sounds above us, but, at this point, that too has become less incongruent with this fairytale city.