Platform * Liesel Burisch x Martin Wendelbo & Regen Li

Des Menschen Ehre, Muth und Pracht  
im Todt vergeht und wird gebracht  
mit diesen Bein zur Erd und Koth  
und macht aus Hoffart ewig Noth

Human honour, courage, and glory must  
in death decay and turn to dust  
with these bones to earth brought low 
pride shall become eternal woe 

So it was written upon the charnel house of St. Nicholas Church, where bones of the graveyard lay at rest, declaring that both flesh and deed must perish when the end arrives. A memento mori that weighed mortal existence against the promise of eternal beyond, until the fire of 1795 consumed the church and scattered the sacred to the wind. 

What is left between the empty gallery walls is not entirely clear. A rare sanctuary in the commercial city centre or a secular refuge freed from theology’s inherited dogmas? After all, what remains is as much a void for what has been as a site where something new must find its place. A threshold stretching beyond lived experience, perhaps still able to hold what eludes the logic of time. We glimpse it only in the briefest of moments, reaching toward it in the hidden places that still carry what dwells beyond ourselves. 

"Nur in Zeit" — only in time — opens a triptych of sanctuaries where ritual repetition embodies what would otherwise slip between the hands of time. In the vulnerable Leang Leang caves of Indonesia, 40,000-year-old handprints reach out from the cradle of humanity and cling to the ancient stone walls. Meanwhile, in a basement in Frederiksberg, all the communion wafers of Denmark are produced, as the rhythm between worn-out machine and manual labour preserves and circulates the memory of Christ’s body. And in a crumbling building in Berlin’s Mitte, where the decadent Phantom Bar hides, traces of a recently dispersed party are evoked in a final dance among shattered glass and empty bags. A particular rhythm threads through these three spaces, marking them as zones where time moves differently, and every gesture becomes a quiet attempt to draw something greater into the light. 

Here, there is no final closure. Only a fleeting glimpse of something opening at the very moment it is about to close. Ready to be carried forward from the dust of what once was.  

Text by curators Martin Wendelbo and Regen Li.

The exhibition "Nur in Zeit" is on view from 10 October to 23 November 2025.

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The exhibition "Nur in Zeit" is supported by Statens Kunstfond, Fake Foundation, Knud Højgaards Fond, and 15. Juni Fonden. Special thanks to Dansk Video Center, Diakonissestiftelsen, and Pacukka Projects for their valuable collaboration.

The exhibition space Platform is realised with support from Det Obelske Familiefond.