Filipino Photographer Gab Mejia shortlisted for FOTO Bali Festival 2026

FOTO Bali Festival 2025

From nearly 700 submissions spanning over 80 countries, FOTO Bali Festival 2026 has selected 36 artist to be featured in its second edition. The exhibition positions photography as both a reflective and critical medium within a global context. Among those shortlisted is Filipino photographer Gab Mejia, whose inclusion signals the growing presence of Southeast Asian practitioners in international platforms.

Launched by Nuanu Creative City, FOTO Bali Festival support lens-based practices through exhibitions, public programs, and educational initiatives that bridge local and international perspectives. Its structure encourages engagement beyond the gallery, opening conversations to wider communities, students, and audiences.

Anchored on this year’s theme, Afterimage, the selected works examine how images persist—reshaping memory, reframing histories, and influencing how we understand both personal and collective experience over time. Curator Kurniadi Widodo notes, “The qualities and approaches reflected in these works align with what we envisioned when the theme was first introduced. We aim to present practices that demonstrate both strong commitment and diversity of visual languages within contemporary photography.”

Gab Mejia's White Water. 2022 - Ongoing

Project: White Water

“I’m currently working on a long-term project entitled White Water,” shares Gab Mejia. “It begins with my personal archive—family photographs damaged by floodwaters after Typhoon Ketsana (Ondoy) in 2009. As these images dried, their surfaces developed chemical alterations, bleached emulsions, and dissolving borders, materially echoing the fragile coastal landscapes they once recorded.”

White Water unfolds as both a personal and political inquiry. Mejia draws connections between the instability of photographic surfaces and the shifting realities of coastlines in the Philippines, where rising seas and environmental precarity continuously reshape the land. The project further interrogates the legacy of colonial mapping and the history of “whiteness” as a structuring force. Water emerges as a disruptive agent, undoing fixed boundaries and raising a central question: can photography and mapping confront the very systems that produce erasure?

Through a combination of images, research, and collaboration with coastal communities, White Water reimagines geography as fluid rather than fixed. 

As Festival Director Kelsang Dolma notes, the open call remains central to the festival’s direction, with selections grounded in both conceptual strength and relevance to the theme. With just over five percent of submissions accepted, the process reflects the rigor and diversity shaping contemporary photographic practice today.

Memory and Milestone

When asked about what being shortlisted in the festival means to him at this point of his career he shares, "I’ve been sitting with these family images and archives that were flooded for more than a decade, and devoted a lot of my life in my career documenting the impacts of the climate crisis from Super-typhoon Odette, the floods and the ongoing land reclamation in Manila Bay among other coastal islands, all these pivotal moments, amid the heaviness of wading between grief and hope, being part of FOTO Bali, made me realize how we are not alone amid our struggles as an archipelagic country reckoning with systems of empires that are collapsing. How empowering it is to be able to share this story of both tide and memory with our island neighbors."

Mejia’s inclusion situates his practice within this global conversation. A queer Filipino photographer and environmental engineer, his work bridges visual storytelling, ecology, and participatory research. Drawing from themes of climate crisis, biodiversity, and ancestral knowledge, Mejia’s projects often blur documentary and speculative approaches. His participation signals a growing recognition of Southeast Asian perspectives in international photography, while reinforcing the urgency of ecological narratives within contemporary image-making.

FOTO Bali is set to open on June 3 to July 12, 2026 at Nuanu Creative City in Bali.