FOTO Bali Festival 2026 Open Call

Selected works will be professionally exhibited at the Nuanu Creative City during the FOTO Bali Festival, in Indonesia, with production cost and installation covered by the organizer.

Overview

This edition turns its attention to what remains once something has already happened; after the moment has slipped, after transformation has taken hold, after attention has drifted elsewhere. The festival is looking for works that reflect on endurance rather than the immediacy of the image. Projects that engage in what lingers: unresolved histories, altered landscapes, or lived conditions shaped by power, control, resilience and care.

Afterimage approaches photography as a medium that unfolds over time, shaped by flux rather than finality. Images resist being fixed or settled; their meaning does not resolve at the moment they are made. As photographs circulate and persist, questions of visibility emerge: Which lives, places and experiences continue to be seen, and which slip from view? How are control, structural violence, resilience and survival made visible or normalized through familiarity? The theme invites practices that attend to persistence rather than climax, and that consider photography as a site where meaning and imagination are quietly and continuously negotiated.

Rather than focusing on events as they unfold, Afterimage looks toward their aftermath: consequences, traces, quiet continuations and prolonged season of uncertainties. This edition of FOTO Bali Festival invites practitioners to ponder upon photography as a long perpetual conversation with time instead of a single instance. They are interested in practices that stay with places, bodies, communities, or images over time, where life does not end but carries on into altered conditions.

Practical Info

FOTO Bali Festival welcomes submissions that engage with the aftermath and residue of events, exploring how personal and collective memories are preserved through places, objects, and bodies. We are interested in work that examines landscapes shaped by intervention, extraction, or repair, as well as archival and re-photographic practices that investigate how images are altered and reinterpreted over time. Ultimately, we seek projects that offer a critical reflection on photography’s ability to document and engage with people, places, and objects that have since changed or passed away.

Submissions may include still photography, moving image, photobooks, installation, or multimedia works. Projects may be documentary, conceptual, or hybrid, but should demonstrate sustained engagement rather than a single moment or event.

AI-based or generative works may be submitted, but will be considered only where their use is conceptually grounded in the afterlife of images, such as archives, circulation, reproduction, or transformation and not as technical display. The concept must clearly lead the use of tools.

Selected works will be professionally exhibited at the Nuanu Creative City during the FOTO Bali Festival, with production cost and installation covered by the organizer. 

About FOTO Bali Festival

FOTO Bali Festival is an international photography-led cultural festival developed within Nuanu Creative City. Rooted in Bali’s social, ecological and artistic rhythms, the festival approaches photography and image-based practice as a living, social medium—encountered through public space, shared experiences, learning formats, and everyday circulation. At its core, FOTO Bali is about connection, between photographers and audiences, images and place, practice and livelihood.