The second edition of Jakarta International Photo Festival (JIPFest) is scheduled for 13-28 November 2021 at the legendary Kota Tua (Old Town) in the northern part of Jakarta. Most of the major events will take place in historical buildings within the area, many of them Dutch heritage colonial buildings.
JIPFest 2021 will feature 12 main programs: Artist Talk, Discussion, Fringe, Photo Exhibition, Photo Book Exhibition, Portfolio Review, Projections Night, Public Lecture, Workshop, Urban Photo Tour, as well as two new programs Photo Fair and Meet & Greet. The curatorial team consists of Sayed Asif Mahmud (Bangladesh), Kurniadi Widodo (Indonesia) and Ng Swan Ti (Indonesia).
With SPACE as the festival theme, JIPFest wishes to explore contemporary issues on living spaces, modernization and urbanization. In the context of physical space, one of the biggest issues in the 21th century is the demographic distribution between villages and cities. Today, 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 60% by 2030. This shift poses a great pressure on the living space within the city, while at the same time impacting the labor force in the village, caused by a demographic imbalance that affects policy formulation and welfare prospects.
In a personal context, SPACE has become an increasingly complex issue of the digital age. In 2019, around 4.1 billion human population have access to internet, and the internet will not only transcend geographical boundaries, but also personal ones. Identity, preferences, and human behavior easily turn into public spectacle, public data, even a tool for manipulation. Determining the boundaries between public and personal domain makes for one of the hottest debates of this century.
