Congratulations to all selected artists!

The Jakarta International Photo Festival (JIPFest) 2026 curatorial team, Chelsea Chua (Singapore) and Yoppy Pieter (Indonesia), has selected 22 photography and multimedia projects from 17 countries to be presented in Photo Exhibition at JIPFest 2026, taking place at Taman Ismail Marzuki, Cikini, Central Jakarta, from 11–20 September 2026.

The selected projects were chosen through our Open Call (6 April–11 May 2026) and curatorial invitations. This year, we received 408 submissions from artists representing 58 countries, reflecting the diversity and vibrancy of contemporary photographic practices worldwide.

Thank you to everyone who shared their stories with us. See you at JIPFest 2026.

How to Fabricate a Memory?

(2025 - 2026) | Palestine

Returning to his homeland of Palestine after 16 years away, Ahmed Alaqra felt estranged from a landscape that had been subject to countless interpretations and interventions. Seeking an encounter with the land that was more personal and intimate, he turned to his film negatives from photographs made over many years, cutting and stitching together images of a Palestinian landscape that lives in both collective and personal memory and imagination. These composite images contain the past and the future, devastation and hope. I am moved by how the violence of their making coexists with tenderness and longing, where memory becomes a site of reclamation and resilience.

Roots

(2022 - Ongoing) | Ukraine

The body takes centrestage in Artem Humilevskyi’s compelling series of self portraits, made in response to the ongoing war in Ukraine. Tragic, humorous and tender, Humilevskyi’s body becomes a site where conflict, myths and national identity play out. I am compelled by how these self portraits connect us to broader issues of military conflict and national sovereignty, while portraying vulnerability, resilience and strength.

Farīsāt: Gunpowder’s Daughters

2025 | Italy

Rooted in Morocco’s UNESCO-recognized equestrian tradition of Tbourida, this project highlights the resilience of women challenging gender barriers within a cultural practice long dominated by men. Through her portraits of the farīsāt (female horse riders), Chantal Pinzi demonstrates that traditions continue to evolve through courage and the pursuit of equal participation. What I find particularly compelling is the way this work shows that tradition can become a space for transformation without losing its cultural roots.

Holding Water

(2010 - 2015) | Vietnam

Holding Water is a long-term project by photographer Duy-Phuong Le Nguyen that depicts life along the banks of the Tri An Lake in Vietnam, which has been impacted by the building of a hydroelectric dam. Having developed a close relationship with the communities living near the lake, Le Nguyen collaborated with them to stage tableaus inspired by everyday life. I am struck by the paintery, bucolic nature of this work, belied by a tension borne out of the fragility of their environment, the pressures of development and the resilience needed to carry on.

Shine Heroes

(2018-2022) | Uruguay

Through close collaboration with shoe shiners in La Paz and El Alto, Bolivia, this project explores the resilience of a community living under social stigma and discrimination. The masks they wear become symbols of protection, solidarity, and resistance against exclusion. By positioning the shoe shiners as co-authors of the visual narrative, the work presents a representation shaped by their own lived experiences. I am particularly drawn to its collaborative approach, which transforms photography into a space for reclaiming dignity and identity.

Andinos

Peru

This series of portraits by Gabriel Barreto Bentin of the community of Andean society of Cusco, Peru, gives an intimate and honest view into everyday lives and diversity of the people who inhabit the area. Made during the photographer’s prolonged stay in the area, the subjects of these portraits radiate trust and warmth, while capturing how the traditional exists comfortably alongside the modern.

M’kumba

(2019 - Ongoing) | Brazil

M’kumba is an ongoing photographic project that documents the resilience of Afro-Brazilian communities in the face of religious intolerance. Working with people from these communities both as a believer and a photographer, Christ co-created portraits that take reference from the mythological figures in Afro-Brazilian religions, while also documenting symbols and religious relics. I find the images compelling for how they radiate power and agency, and how they uplift a marginalised community that continues to struggle to have their voices heard.

Tibetan Country Doctor

(2023 - Ongoing) | USA

Set in the mountainous Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of western Sichuan, where the nearest hospital can be as much as five hours away, this project reveals resilience through the unwavering dedication of a rural doctor caring for his community. Combining photography with handwritten annotations by Zhaba Gyatso, the work moves beyond documenting medical practice to illuminate how trust, local knowledge, and human relationships form the foundation of care in places with limited access to healthcare. I am particularly drawn to the way this collaborative process expands the language of documentary photography, transforming it into a shared space for multiple voices and lived experiences.

A Kind of Magic

(2014 - 2024) | Singapore

Forced to leave her birthplace of Bandung, Indonesia, in the wake of anti-Chinese violence in May 1998, A Kind of Magic sees Juliana Tan revisit the familiar sites of her childhood. In this project, photography becomes a means through which to negotiate the past and the present, the personal and the collective, memory and imagination. I am taken by the gentle and persistent longing embedded in these images and how they advocate for a quiet resistance against historical erasure.

Vivi Para Contarlo / Live to Tell

(2017-2025) | Italy

Spanning multiple countries, this long-term project reveals how gender-based violence transcends geographical, social, and cultural boundaries. Yet beyond documenting trauma, it foregrounds women who choose to speak out, build solidarity, and fight for their rights. For me, the strength of this work lies in its ability to shift the focus away from violence itself and toward the courage of women who continue to create hope and inspire social change.

CHILDREN OF THE SNOWY PEAK

(2019 - Ongoing) | India

Drawing from the photographer’s personal journey as a member of the Indigenous Lepcha community in Sikkim, India, this project offers a reflection on resilience through the relationship between people, nature, and collective memory. Amid the pressures of dam construction and the climate crisis, it reveals how resilience also emerges through the preservation of Indigenous knowledge and spiritual connections to ancestral landscapes. For me, the work broadens the meaning of resilience, showing it as the ability to safeguard cultural heritage while protecting the natural world.

The Colony 

(2023-2026) | Australia

Developed in Larrakia Country in Australia’s Northern Territory, this project reflects on resilience through a dialogue between colonial knowledge systems and ways of knowing rooted in land, oral traditions, and the natural world. By collaborating with termites that transform colonial books into sculptural objects, the work challenges the authority of written archives while proposing new ways of understanding memory and history. I am fascinated by its experimental approach, which questions who has the authority to shape knowledge and historical narratives.

When Spring Never Comes 

(2024 - Ongoing) I Myanmar

In 2024, Min Ma Naing was reunited with the photo negatives that she had left in Myanmar when she fled the military coup. Time and exposure has left their mark on these negatives -  as the artist says, “What survives does not come back unchanged”. The prints from these negatives are shown together with photos made in Min Ma Naing’s current location in Berlin, which have been developed using alternative processes. This work is striking in its attempt to reconcile the past and the present, our old selves with the new. It asks, what is lost in the act of resistance and survival, and if the cost is too much to bear.

May the Matter Rest

(2020 - Ongoing) |Thailand

After the death of their mother in 2020, Natthaya Thaidecha and her siblings discovered that she had been embroiled in a complicated web of financial activities that had been left to them to resolve posthumously. Faced with threats by figures of authority and never-ending legal processes, the siblings bore their grief while shouldering the burden of these responsibilities which they had never anticipated. I am drawn to the vulnerability and honesty in this work, in how it captures the emotional toll that love and family can take, but also the resilience needed to continue.

Descendants of Summer

(2018 - Ongoing) | Bermuda

Rooted in Bermuda’s colonial history, this project explores how identity, memory, and the legacy of slavery continue to shape contemporary life. Through a combination of portraiture, landscape, archival materials, and oral histories developed in collaboration with the local community, the work reflects on resilience as an act of preserving memory, reclaiming marginalized narratives, and rebuilding a sense of belonging in the aftermath of colonialism. For me, this project demonstrates that remembrance is itself a form of resilience, particularly when communities reclaim the authority to tell their own histories.

Nature’s Retaliation

(2025 - Ongoing) | Indonesia

Tin mining in the Bangka Belitung Islands has been conducted for generations, degrading rivers and threatening the habitat of the saltwater crocodile, a creature who has survived multiple mass extinctions over millions of years. As mining activity in the area expands, human encroachment into crocodile territory has resulted in more attacks on people, and as a result, retaliation in the form of relocating or killing crocodiles. In these images, I see how the resilience of this ancient animal is put to the test, and how these extractive activities also take their toll on humans.

We Were Farmers 

(2008-2020) | Singapore

In 2020, the farm owned by Ore Huiying’s family shuttered its doors, the land slated by the government for housing projects. This signaled the end of a family business that had lasted three generations, and the closure of a space that saw the blossoming of sustenance, kinships, and knowledge. I am taken by how Ore’s photographs tenderly portray the resilience needed to build an agriculture business in a land scarce country, and then gracefully manage its loss.

How Must I Live?

(2024 - Ongoing) | Indonesia

Drawing on his own lived experience as a queer individual who grew up in a conservative Chinese family, Ryan Andrew sought out artistic collaborators with whom he explored ideas of identity, desire and kinship. In these images, we see portraits and symbols that gesture to a solidarity formed through a shared vulnerability and resilience; I particularly like how photography becomes a means through which to gain agency and acceptance by reframing the ways in which the body is seen and understood.

El pez muere por la boca / The Fish Dies by Its Mouth

(2016-2024) | Colombia

Against narratives that often reduce Colombia’s coastal regions to sites of drug trafficking and armed violence, Santiago Escobar-Jaramillo offers a more nuanced understanding of resilience as an everyday practice. Through a participatory and performative approach, he positions community members as active collaborators in shaping representations of their own experiences, revealing how tradition, memory, and social bonds become sources of dignity and identity. What resonates most with me is the way this work shifts our attention away from conflict itself and toward a community’s enduring capacity to nurture life, sustain solidarity, and create spaces of hope amid ongoing adversity.

In The Shadow of the Tiger

(2022-2024) | India

Documented over more than a decade in the Sundarbans of India, this project explores resilience through the lives of communities adapting to ecological vulnerability and ongoing human-tiger conflict. Amid accelerating environmental change, it reveals how resilience grows from maintaining a delicate balance between livelihoods, environmental stewardship, and cultural heritage. What resonates most with me is the way the project portrays the relationship between people and nature as the very foundation of resilience.

We Were Just Little Boys

(2023-2025) | Australia

Drawing from the history of the Kinchela Aboriginal Boys Training Home in Australia, this project presents resilience through the experiences of survivors of the Stolen Generations as they return to a place marked by trauma. Through an observational approach and portraiture, the photographer does more than document a historic site; the work creates space for the survivors to reclaim their own narratives. What stayed with me most is the way photography becomes a medium for listening, remembering, and restoring space for voices that have long been marginalized.

Bye Bye Home Sweet Home

(2021-2024) \ Japan

With her grandmother’s home slated for demolition, Yuki Furusawa, together with her mother and sister, began the arduous task of sorting through her grandmother’s possessions to prepare for her impending move. As they went through thousands of items, some of which had been kept for decades, she realised that these objects each held precious memories; memories that in her grandmother’s old age, were increasingly fragile and difficult to hold on to. I am drawn to how Furusawa, in her attempt to memorialise her grandmother’s home and attachment to her family possessions, made photographs infused with tenderness, humour and longing; a longing for these memories to resist the erosion of time.