About JiP

JiP stands for Joon in Photograhpy. Joon means beautiful in Korean and is Erika's Korean name. JiP is a monthly digital image letter; each time Erika shows another photo from old and new projects with a short description. In addition to the digital image letter, JiP contains a website with more work.

Erika Blikman

Erika Blikman, born in Pusan (South Korea) in 1974, grew up in the Netherlands. She studied Communication at the university in Enschede and Visual Communication at the AKI, Art academy also in Enschede. Erika works as a photographer, curator and as project management and photography teacher.

Work

Erika explores the medium photography by researching how she can portray someone's identity and personality with a camera. But doing do so, she also places people in certain surroundings and circumstances.
The people that she photographs have in common that they are not 'at home' in the group or society were they belong to. Questions that occupy her are:
1. where do you feel at home?
2. where do you belong?
Not being at home gives an alienated feeling. The inner side and outside are complimentary, but also in conflict with each other. That makes taking photos from people for her interesting.
We all look at each other, this happens unconscious but with my photos we start to start to feel aware. Maybe then we are willing to look with new perspectives to someone else.

Curator

One of Erika's major projects was curating a group exhibition about adoption in 2005 called 'Remi'. Together with 7 other artists she showed her work in the 'Oude Kerk' in Amsterdam. Besides 'Remi' she took part in several group, duo and solo exhibitions in and outside the Netherlands.
Erika curates since 2003 exhibitions for artist collective &tree (www.stichtingentree.nl). She started this art foundation with Frouwkje Smit. Members of the board are among others the director of the Apple and visual artist Dirk Jan Jager.