Mika Sperling

In Mother Tongue, Mika Sperling (*1990) examines how origins and culture influence interpersonal relationships based on her personal family history. Language plays a key role in this. Her young daughter and her Vietnamese stepmother are the focus of the photographic examination. Sperling experiments with perspectives, close-ups, and reflecting surfaces and shows the surroundings and personal objects of the individuals portrayed. Trained in a documentary tradition, Sperling represents a new generation of photo-essayists that takes up historical references and processes them in various mediums and objects so as to engage more intensively with the audience. Text in English, with additional texts in German, Russian and Vietnamese. 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. SELLING POINTS: . Touching and aesthetic photographic essay about origin, family and culture . Sperling represents a new generation of photo-essayists that takes up historical references and processes them in various mediums and objects so as to engage more intensively with the audience