Artist, Kirsten Justesen, recalls the exhibition in the following anecdote published in O - Overgadens anniversary book: Overgaden 1986-2011 (2011):

"In 1980 I lived in Greenland, and there I really used to see icebergs. They are fantastic floating sculptures in all sizes, constantly changing shape and moving in the landscape, so you tend to lose focus, lose your orientation. Icebergs break up, fall apart and melt – disappear. I have worked with ice as a material ever since then, presenting pictures, skin, sound and time in many forms. This metamorphosis, the fact that a material can change shape over time and disappear, presents some challenges that I have not yet finished addressing. The exhibition at Overgaden was the fifth Smeltetid (Melting Time) in a row, and number 17 is now under way.

In the four previous Smeltetider I had tried out a number of conditions that I now wanted to examine in more detail, and over a longer period of time. I did this in 1993, over four weeks at Overgaden, which was then one of Copenhagen’s available platforms. Here you were your own curator, and you were responsible for everything yourself, including the finances. ‘Thanks to the Højlund Foundation’, as it was then, and the brief was to involve amateurs! There were no funds to employ anyone to look after the exhibition, so I decided to create a different event every day, with a guest who had some relationship with ice and could contribute with new perspectives and additions. The mail art artist Mogens Otto Nielsen had worked with snow and ice, William Louis Sørensen brought frozen sounds, and the composer Jakob Draminsky Højmark made a composition based on a freezing-point. The icebreaker captain Helge Rasmussen talked about his dramatic experiences in the Arctic Sea, astrophysicist Niels Lund brought a video of Halley’s comet so that we could see ice in space, the glaciologist Ellen Laursen demonstrated f low models for ice, Poul Borum gave the students of the Danish Writers School an assignment on melting times, which they read aloud, and the literary critic Jette Lundbo Levy talked about the importance of things disappearing.

The installation section consisted of ice sculptures such as Bord (Table), Taburet (Stool) and Trappe (Stairway), while in ten video works you could see various combinations of human skin and ice. I received around 50 Melting Mails from colleagues I had invited from around the world, and by fax we obtained aircraft and satellite observations from the Ice Patrol in Narsarsuaq, which monitors iceberg movements in the Arctic, while Ulla Ryum sent poetic faxes on the ice situation in Antarctica.

The word S M E L T E T I D was spelt out in ice letters 50 cm tall, until they melted or were blown over by T.S. Høeg’s saxophone, and were put into the freezers ready for the next day. Every Friday afternoon from three to five there were performances, based on a very precise score. I myself performed with various dancers, and the performance artists David Dronet from France and Tim Brennan from the UK also took part. In the spaces, ice terms in Danish, Greenlan- dic and Finnish were heard, mingling with the sounds of the melting objects. The audience, who sat for a long time on their stools in the hope that an ice letter or object would break, could have ‘ice on the rocks’ or a glass of water. The exhibition was very well attended and attracted a lot of publicity, including a long, poetic TV broadcast, which attracted even more visitors."