Text by Manuel Beinat
All Images © Mika Sperling
Mika Sperling was born as the youngest of eight children in the remote, closed city of Norilsk, Russia. She later relocated to Germany, where she pursued studies in photography and book design before completing her MFA in studio art at the San Francisco Art Institute in California. Her artistic practice is deeply rooted in photography and writing. Time and again, she returns to her childhood, seeking to confront significant, often traumatic, life events. Through this introspective process, she unravels the complex emotions attached to these memories, aiming to understand and ultimately heal. Since the age of thirteen, Sperling has used self-portraiture and creative writing as tools for documenting and processing her personal journey. Currently residing and working in Darmstadt, Germany, her work has been exhibited internationally at renowned venues such as the Rencontres d’Arles, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Fort Mason Center for Arts, and Foam Museum in Amsterdam. Sperling’s project I Have Done Nothing Wrong has garnered several prestigious awards, including the Louis Roederer Discovery Award, the Zeitstiftung Bucerius Fellowship, and the German DGPH Award. In 2024, it was published as a monograph by Actes Sud, marking her second major publication.
Domestic violence is a cycle, whose phases move between conflict, fear, calm, and reconciliation. Then everything can begin again, with further harm; or it can stop, if the cycle is exposed and dismantled. What has just been summarized in a few reductive and simplistic words refers to the model developed by psychologist Leonore E. Walker in 1979. As with any model, this “cycle of abuse” falls far short of representing the wide range of ways in which patriarchal and gender-based violence can take shape.
This is a space dedicated to photography, and it is through this medium—while also moving beyond it—that Mika Sperling unpacks her personal experience, where violence and abuse coexist with resistance and determination.
I Have Done Nothing Wrong is a body of work that embraces complexity and allows it to exist. What is not welcoming, instead, is the subject of the German artist’s project. As uncomfortable as the topic of domestic violence may be, it is nonetheless necessary to talk about it, to discuss it, and to continually bring it back to the political and systemic level that generates and legitimizes it.
In this process of legitimization, the media and the images we look at (and are subjected to) every day also play a role. Through the multidisciplinary form of her project, Sperling helps us re question the representation of vernacular photography, family albums, and that both eerie and cozy place we usually call home.
I Have Done Nothing Wrong addresses the abuse Sperling experienced during her childhood and adolescence. The perpetrator was her grandfather, “Marichen,” a central figure in the artist’s narrative, whose presence-through-absence is as overwhelming as it is fleeting and ghostlike. The project unfolds along a continuum between past and present (and, in part, toward the future), examining the relationship between the grandfather, Sperling, and the rest of her family. The work is composed of newly staged images, cut archival photographs, and an imagined theatrical piece based on a hypothetical confrontation between victim and perpetrator.
The photographs were made with the involvement of the artist’s daughter, and this is where an outlook toward the future emerges, both hopeful and deeply concerned. The archival images, on the other hand, are treated in a way that removes the perpetrator from the scene: his figure is literally cut out of the photograph. The theme of removal is the first to connect, bitterly, with the way we as viewers consume images when patriarchal violence occurs. In mainstream media, it is usually the victim who is removed. The abuser is humanized and understood; their actions are framed through love and emotional bonds, often leaving aside the systemic dynamics that legitimize and normalize violence. Images play a central role as well. The victim is often shown together with the person who committed the violence, perhaps in old moments of joy, tenderness, and apparent serenity. When shown alone, the victim is frequently photographed in an attractive or provocative way.
By physically removing her grandfather’s figure from the images, Sperling recalibrates the viewer’s attention. The perpetrator remains central to the narrative, but what occupies the image is no longer his face or body, only his outline. This presence-through-absence prevents the viewer from identifying or empathizing with him, shifting the focus back to the person who suffered the violence.
Another key theme emerging from the photographs made with Sperling’s daughter concerns familial complicity and the possible legacy that a traumatic experience can produce. During her grandfather’s funeral in 2009, Sperling recalls her grandmother whispering to her, “you knew he was good.” An intimate and harrowing sentence that nonetheless conceals cultural systems and social patterns that have been internalized and normalized over centuries.
This raises a question: to what extent is the silence—and therefore the complicity—of the rest of the family shaped by the culture we are immersed in? This is not an attempt to absolve individuals of responsibility, but rather to consider how the ways we are taught to “see” and “listen to” gender based violence may have led previous generations to underestimate or normalize dangerous and harmful relational models.
Here again, Sperling overturns the system. She involves her daughter, photographs her in all her fragility and purity, and places her within a project that looks toward the long term. Sperling says: “Identifying one perpetrator does not exclude the possibility that there are others, and the way many of us continue to raise our children (teaching them to obey adults in general) makes them easy targets.”
Photography thus becomes a multidirectional bridge, through which the artist speaks to her daughter, her family, and the viewer. The aim is to bring to the surface—without shame—what loved ones, embedded in a patriarchal and misogynistic society, have allowed to happen. Even the vernacular tone of the family album is subverted. The lightness, joy, and togetherness we are used to rediscovering in old drawers are not truly present here. Or rather, what emerges is an awkward and fragmented attempt to replicate a socially accepted model of a happy family. The result is a series of forced images, with stiff faces, tense bodies, and smiles that never fully appear.
Exposing one’s own intimacy, wounds, and fears is in itself a valuable act, one that allows the viewer to look at themselves, and to look again. The guiding principle of this project, which is also the guiding light of feminism’s difficult and winding path, is that the personal is political. The way the project is presented allows for a slow and reflective discussion on domestic and gender-based violence, outside mainstream circuits, away from large numbers and statistics (which are crucial for understanding the scale of the phenomenon, but can also risk numbing those who read them).
The images do not function as a mere visual appendix to a tragedy. Instead, they become the very means through which we can reflect on and rethink past, present, and future relationships. Personal experience is politicized through removal, not of the damage or the trauma, but of the face that committed the violence. Once again, by removing the perpetrator’s facial features, the mask falls away: we are all involved, we are all—especially men—part of the problem. The absence of a face forces us to question ourselves, our roles, and our responsibilities within the chains of harm produced by the patriarchal system.
Can the cycle be broken, then? Sperling’s work seems to suggest that it can at least be identified, contained, and reworked. But attention must remain high. What is certain is that showing trauma through absence—made visible through the evocative power of images—remains one of the most democratic and accessible ways to bring the debate back to the ground: to talk about it, to question it, and to be attentive to what we read, what we watch, and what we listen to.
