Tiga Mata Issue 5 Open Call

Selected Southeast Asian artists will be published on Tiga Mata Issue 5, a collective meditation on the unstable yet fertile ground where truth, image, authorship, and imagination converge.

Overview

Photography is ever evolving, becoming film, digital, data, and beyond. It flows across materials, platforms, and contexts, never fixed and always in motion. Once regarded as factual records, photographs today circulate endlessly through data streams, copied, recontextualised, and reinterpreted. In this constant flux, images no longer merely represent truth; they shape it, altering how personal narratives are performed, how collective memory is formed, and how visibility often outweighs veracity.

Photographers, once seen as transmitters of truth, now operate within uncertainty. To work with photography today is to engage with ambiguity: to question what is seen, what is obscured, and what is constructed in between. Within this instability lies both critical urgency and creative possibility.

With Truth Flux, Tiga Mata invites artists, photographers, and image-makers from Southeast Asia to engage with photography in its fluid, transformative state. They seek photographic works and photography-driven projects that critically respond to shifting modes of image production, circulation, and reception through experimental image-making, conceptual inquiry, documentary reinvention, archival engagement, or visual research.

Practical Info

Both amateur and professional photographers, including photo-related artists, who are nationals of Southeast Asian countries — Malaysia, Brunei, Myanmar, Cambodia, Timor-Leste, Indonesia, Laos, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam are invited to submit to the open call.

All entries must be submitted digitally via the Tiga Mata #5 Submission Form. Alongside visual material, applicants are required to include accompanying texts or reflections that situate the work within its conceptual, social, or cultural context.

Submitted works must be authored by the submitting artist or photographer and grounded in their own photographic or creative process. Where photographs not taken by the submitting artist are used, their sources must be clearly credited, contextualised, and ethically engaged.

Selected contributions will form Tiga Mata Issue 5, a collective meditation on the unstable yet fertile ground where truth, image, authorship, and imagination converge.

About Tiga Mata

Tiga Mata is a bi-annual photography zine rooted in Southeast Asia, dedicated to spotlighting the region’s vibrant and diverse photographic voices. Its name, meaning “Three Eyes” in Malay, reflects how photographers in the region often navigate the world visually, emotionally, and contextually. Each issue is built around a specific theme and is curated in collaboration with a guest editor—bringing fresh curatorial energy and deeper regional insight. With a visual-first approach, Tiga Mata prioritizes the power of photography to transcend language and cultural borders. Images lead the storytelling; sometimes accompanied by text, sometimes standing on their own—offering space for visual narratives to unfold with clarity, complexity, and emotional depth.

Published in a limited run per issue, Tiga Mata aims to remain intimate, intentional, and grounded in tangible circulation. It isn’t just a publication; it’s a growing conversation on what Southeast Asian photography can become when shaped on its own terms—without the need to conform, translate, or explain.