Katharina Spitz "Forget Me Not" Ausstellung // Junges Design

In the organizer's words:

Katharina Spitz (* 1993) is the first resident in fashion in the support program Fund for Young Design at MK&G. Her final project "Forget Me Not" will be presented from October 27 to December 10, 2023. The fashion designer uses materials as an expressive means to make complex social issues tangible in textiles and performances. With Katharina Spitz, the Stiftung Hamburger Kunstsammlungen (SHK) is already sponsoring the sixth position in the program for young designers initiated in 2021.

For the exhibition "Forget Me Not" at MK&G, Katharina Spitz explores different forms of memory cultures - from monuments to personal symbol carriers to dynamic textile objects - and questions the intentions and practices with which we capture memories. Katharina Spitz makes the ambivalences in form visible by combining opposing fabric properties to create an ambiguous materiality: ceramic imprints of body parts cite the eternalism of antique marble busts and are encased in fine yarn; crocheted textiles and flowing wool fabrics abstract the "knot in the handkerchief"; delicate forget-me-not embroidery is almost absorbed by black velvet. "I argue for a mobile, social form of memory that embraces transience, as opposed to a society that tries to manifest itself as eternal through its objects of memory, resisting the passage of time and mortality," the designer explains. In addition to newly created works, the exhibition features objects from the MK&G collection, including for the first time the series "My Memorial" by photographer Bettina Flitner (* 1961), fashion photographs by F.C. Gundlach (1926-2021), a wooden quatrefoil head as a memento mori (c. 1650), and intricately knotted hair objects (Hamburg, c. 1800-1850) in personal memory of the deceased.