Katharina Spitz (b. 1993) is the first resident in the field of fashion to take part in the Fund for Young Design programme at the MK&G. Her final project, “Forget Me Not”, will be on view from 27 October to 10 December 2023. The fashion designer uses fabric as a means of expression for making complex social issues tangible in her textiles and performances. Spitz is the sixth young designer to be promoted by the Stiftung Hamburger Kunstsammlungen (SHK) in the funding programme it initiated in 2021.

In the exhibition “Forget Me Not” at the MK&G, the designer explores varied forms of memory culture – ranging from monuments to personal symbolic trinkets to dynamic textile objects – to question why and how we choose to hold onto certain memories. She makes the ambivalences inherent in the forms taken by such tokens of remembrance visible by combining opposing fabric properties and thus creating an ambiguous materiality: Ceramic imprints of body parts recalling the striving for immortality embodied by antique marble busts are encased in finely spun thread; crocheted textiles and flowing wool fabrics propose an abstract alternative to the “knot in the handkerchief”; and delicate forget-me-not embroidery is nearly absorbed by black velvet. “I plead for a mobile, social form of memory that embraces impermanence, as opposed to a society that tries to manifest itself as eternal through its commemorative objects, resisting the passage of time and mortality,” the designer explains.  In addition to newly created works, the exhibition also features objects from the MK&G collection, including for the first time the series “Mein Denkmal” (My Memorial) by photographer Bettina Flitner (b. 1961) as well as fashion photographs by F.C. Gundlach (1926–2021), a four-faced wooden head as a memento mori (c. 1650), and intricately woven objects made of human hair (Hamburg, c. 1800–1850) as personal mementos of the deceased.