Recommended Olympus Fellowship: Mika Sperling, Karla Hiraldo Voleau, Tobias Kruse

It's about dating services, multicultural family life and legacies of German history: Karla Hiraldo Voleau, Tobias Kruse and Mika Sperling, the second year of the recommended fellowship, allow personal insights into their private themes with their artistic projects.

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The functions and possibilities of contemporary photography are the focus of the fellowship recommended. What role does photography play in sharing information and emotions? What new forms of expression can the medium offer those who work artistically with photography? With such questions in mind, Olympus established the unique fellowship in 2017 together with the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, the Foam Fotografie-museum Amsterdam and the Haus der Photographie/Deichtorhallen Hamburg. For one year, three fellowship recipients work on an artistic project, closely supervised by the curators of the three participating institutions. The results are then presented in the exhibition RECOMMENDED OLYMPUS FELLOWSHIP.

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Karla Hiraldo Voleau, Tobias Kruse and Mika Sperling, the three photographic artists of the second recommended year, use photography to explore biographical realities. To tell their own stories, about love, family, home and origin, migration and tolerance – with themselves as the main characters, and with sometimes intimate insights into their private lives.

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Karla Hiraldo Voleau (*1992, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) explores the mechanisms of modern relationships using the dating culture in Japan as an example. Under the title I have nothing to tell you, she describes gender roles and love stories in poetic documentary images. Through personal and visual dialogues she exchanged ideas with young Japanese people by writing – even scripting sentences on her own skin. Hiraldo Voleau studied photography at the École de Conde in Paris and at the ECAL in Lausanne. During her fellowship she was mentored by Kim Knoppers, curator at Foam.

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Tobias Kruse (*1979, Waren/Müritz, Germany) confronts his eastern German homeland in the series Deponie. His starting points are a former toxic waste dump and other historically contaminated places. In black-and-white photographs, Kruse traces burdened German-German history –and displays equally enduring social moods such as fear, bitterness, resentment, and anger. Kruse studied graphic design and photography at the Ostkreuz School and is a member of the Ostkreuz Agency of Photographers. He was accompanied through the fellowship by Ingo Taubhorn, curator at House of Photography/Deichtorhallen Hamburg.

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Mika Sperling (*1990, Norilsk, Russia) examines the influence of multicultural origins on identity and family relationships. At the center of her work Mother Tongue is the artist herself, who grew up in Germany as the child of a Russian Mennonite family, her Vietnamese mother-in-law, who also lives in Germany, and her two-year-old daughter, who was born in the USA. With sound, video, and written objects, Sperling directs our attention to language – as a barrier, but also as a new link for the coexistence of different cultures. Sperling studied communication design at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences and Fine Arts at the San Francisco Art Institute. She was mentored by Celina Lunsford, curator and artistic director at the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt.

All three fellows work photographically with the camera – and at the same time they enlarge the language of the images with additional media vocabulary. A handwritten love letter, a lullaby, a digital chat or linguistic signs on paper or glass. "In this way, human touch is expressed in many different forms," says recommended curator Celina Lunsford, "and the personal stories vividly open doors to new viewpoints on existential themes."

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The works of the second recommended year were shown in the Haus der Photographie/ Deichtorhallen Hamburg from May 2020 and will be exhibited in the Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam following the exhibition in the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt.

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