Mika Sperling

Photographic meditations on cultural and familial history, from a rising star of the new generation of photo-essayists

Hamburg-based artist Mika Sperling (born 1990) examines how origins, culture and language influence interpersonal relationships through photographs of her young daughter and Vietnamese stepmother. Originally trained in a documentary tradition, Sperling here experiments with perspective, close-ups and reflective surfaces.

About the Author

The artist Mika Sperling (*1990) currently lives and works in Hamburg. She was born in Norilsk, a mining city in Northern Siberia, where her family lived for 20 years, before immigrating to Germany in 1991. Sperling received her degree in communication design from the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences in 2015. From 2016 to 2018, she did her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in the United States with the aid of a Fulbright and a DAAD fellowship.

Her works are based on photography, video, text, and sound and deal with ideas and concepts of family relationships and language. Her works are first and foremost biographical; she examines her own experiences as one of eight children and the complexity of multiculturalism, identity, and belonging.