In M for Mood, Franziska Nast presents a comprehensive tableau of existential and non-existential states intertwined with autobiographical, feminist, art-historical, and pop-cultural references in various media. She translates these references into contradictory materials such as skin, rice paper, metal, or asphalt and inscribes, tattoos, perforates, or sandblasts their surfaces. The resulting narrative layers of image and text fragments form a dialogue with the personal and social meanings of found and manufactured objects. At the intersection of hi-fi and lo-fi aesthetics, fashion, design, visual and tattoo art, a semantic complexity of material and emotional states unfolds. At the same time, themes of memory, care work, and affect reveal the ruptures and overlaps in Nast’s multiple roles as mother, artist, tattoo artist, book designer, owner of the fashion label Fack Fushion, and cofounder of the Kunstverein St. Pauli in Hamburg.
