Photo by Pedro Lange-Chúrion

Jakarta: A Mirror of a Thousand Reflections

Seno [Gumira Adjidarma] once indicated that Jakarta consists of many conceptions and perceptions of space that go beyond the materiality of the built environment. The city is formed by many dimensional layers, but since they are not relationally organized, the order of things is not only messy but also absurd. -Abidin Kusno

 

Jakarta is the capital of Indonesia and the second most populated metropolitan area in the world. Not much else is known about this megacity in the United States. As a place where traffic jams set the pace of daily life and the gap between the high-rise megaplexes and the street life of the kampungs provides a reminder of the unequal progress of postcolonial urbanism, Jakarta is a city whose complexity and ‘messiness’ inspires dreams for development and the future metropolis. Always on the move and hard to decode, Jakarta offers daily and unexpected encounters and challenges to citizens and visitors alike.

 

The exhibition Jakarta: A Mirror of a Thousand Reflections--a collaboration between John Zarobell’s urban research and Pedro Lange-Churión’s photographs-- follows Comparative Urbanism: Learning from Jakarta,  the conference convened in August 2024 at the SPUR Urban Center in San Francisco, with scholars from Jakarta and the Bay Area. The exhibition engages the layered dimensions of a city that transforms itself daily. Not seeking to exoticize—, neither the city, nor its challenges as it adapts to globalization or climate change—, the exhibit works carefully to bear witness to the life and physical structure of the city in order to invite reflection on the many dimensions that make up Jakarta and the many ways its fate and struggles mirror those of all cities.

Photography’s precision in recording reality presents a challenge: how to convey not only what the camera captures, but how the artist sees. The gaze in these images reflects a sense of wonder at Jakarta’s kaleidoscopic urban fabric. Rather than offering a dry documentation of the Indonesian megacity, these photographs—shot on both film and digital, using medium and large formats—seek a layered visual narrative.

Darkroom prints were created on carefully chosen papers to evoke the tones and textures of Atget, Abbott, and Talbot. This deliberate aesthetic contrasts with the immediacy of the urban subject matter, inviting distance and reflection, disrupting exoticized views and commonplace assumptions often projected onto images from the Global South. Likewise, the color photographs—digital and analog—are shaped through framing and print choice to honor Jakarta’s complexity with beauty and dignity.

Pedro Lange-Chúrion is a photographer, filmmaker and professor at the University of San Francisco. His most recent museum exhibition, Duerma en ti, was featured at the Museo Nacional Anthropologia (Madrid, 2022) and other venues throughout Spain. He has directed various films and collaborated in video installations on urban themes, in addition to publishing regularly on world cinema and Latin American and world literatures.

John Zarobell is a professor of Global Studies at the University of San Francisco and the author of two books: Art and the Global Economy (2017) and Empire of Landscape (2010). A former museum curator (SFMOMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art), he has been researching Asian Megacities since 2016 and has taught two travel classes in Jakarta with colleagues from the Urban Planning department of Universitas Tarumanagara.

Past Exhibitions

Apr
10
2025
May
9
2025
San Francisco

Watermarks: Postcards From the Future

Imagine a postcard sent from San Francisco 100 years in the future. What might someone write back and what images would they send to describe how the city has responded to a changing climate in the 22nd century? Watermarks, a new exhibition at SPUR, is an interactive exhibition that invites visitors to explore the past, present, and potential future transformations of the city’s changing shoreline.
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May
5
2023
May
31
2023
San Francisco

Lignin & Lining

Master of Advanced Architectural Design (MAAD) UC Berkeley- Department of Architecture
Studio Director: Professor Maria Paz Gutierrez;
Sponsors/Collaborators: HOK (lead: Paul Woolford)
Producing construction materials such as timber requires much energy to dry and process them. This raises questions about what and how we should build with wood and whether the wood industry can and should be radically transformed. Plants’ unique material and structural defense strategies are multifold, spanning from resistance to microbial deterioration to harboring pathogens to preventing water permeation. This exhibition by the Master of Advanced Architectural Design (MAAD) studio at the UC Berkeley Department of Architecture inquires if defense strategies and intentional incorporation of bacteria and fungi in plant tissue, including woods, can lead to unprecedented material functionalities in the built environment.
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Dec
8
2022
Feb
28
2023
San Francisco

Small Infrastructures

In March 2021, the Biden Administration released the American Jobs Plan, earmarking $213 billion for “quality” and “affordable” housing, yet the bill lacks specificity on how houses are to be built. Architects can play a unique role in bridging abstract policy ambitions to real construction as these connections are made every day in practice. Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) have been a catalyst for including architects in direct policy development. For the first time, cities are directly contracting with architects to provide designs for private property through pre-approved ADU programs. This exhibition of ADU designs uses the economics of building assembly as the groundwork for experimentation and addresses how cities can work with architects to build quality, affordable housing under the American Jobs Plan. Ten architects teaching at Harvard GSD and Berkeley CED consider the overlaps between academia, where cost is often external to conceptual work, and practice, where budgeting is an integral task. The architectural design of each office will be represented by two boards and a handmade architectural model.
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Aug
23
2022
Nov
30
2022
San Francisco

In the Banlieues/Centering the Margin: Saint-Denis/Oakland

Whatever you call them — suburbs, peripheries, banlieues — cities like Oakland, California, and Saint-Denis, France, are today exerting their influence and inventing solutions to challenges posed by equity and the rapid urban development of metropolitan areas. This exhibition highlights a symbolic pivot as artistic movements, social struggles, and urban innovations have begun to emerge from the peripheries, and not just from metropolitan centers.
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Jan
21
2020
Jun
30
2020
San Francisco

We Are the Bay

As part of the SPUR Regional Strategy, we sent photographer Ryan Young out to meet his neighbors. Over the course of a week, Young traveled 2,000 miles north, south, east and west to capture images of residents in the Bay Area's many and varied communities. The resulting photographs and conversations have been turned into We Are the Bay, a new exhibition at the SPUR…
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Jun
24
2019
Nov
11
2019
San Francisco

Non-Linear: The Mind of Michael Painter

Even among landscape architects, Michael Painter was unique. After all, it’s incredibly rare that the person responsible for a project comes as highly admired as the project itself. His ability to beautifully design landforms was surpassed only by his humility, and his love of collaboration was surpassed only by his willingness to ensure that every idea be heard. Ultimately, Michael’s body of work would span a half-century, hundreds of clients and more…
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