Objectifs Documentary Award 2024 Recipients

The Objectifs Documentary Award champions Objectifs’ mission to broaden perspectives through image making, by supporting original voices in visual storytelling in Singapore and the wider region. The Award enables photographers to work on new or existing projects, encouraging them to tell stories about their native communities. It welcomes different creative approaches to non-fiction storytelling, from conventional documentary photography to visual experiments. Projects may be presented in still images or use multimedia.

Successful recipients will be given professional and financial support to work on their projects over a 6 month-long period. The final works are exhibited at Objectifs in April 2025.

The awardees were selected by the following panel of 5 jury members:

  • Jessica Lim Director of Angkor Photo Festival & Workshop, Emerging Category Mentor for 2024
  • Goh Sze Ying Curator at National Gallery Singapore, Open Category Curator for 2024
  • Ng Swan Ti, Managing Director of PannaFoto Institute and Exhibitions Director at Jakarta International Photo Institute. Emerging Category Mentor for 2023
  • Roger Nelson, curator, art historian, and Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Open Category Curator for 2023.
  • Chelsea Chua, Programme Director, Objectifs

OPEN CATEGORY – Gab Mejia (Philippines) 

Gab Mejia (he/they) is a queer Filipino photographer, multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and environmental engineer.

Born and raised by the Philippine archipelago, he explores and weaves the different fabrics of visual storytelling, environmental design, and ecology through the arts, photography, poetics, and participatory research. His work unveils the threads of the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, ancestral knowledge, cosmologies, and cultural interconnections to confront our socio-political and ecological crises.

Mejia is a National Geographic Explorer, Climate Pledge Global Storyteller, Fellow in the International League of Conservation Photographers, 2019 Jackson Wild Media Lab Fellow, and has published stories and works in National Geographic, BBC, CNN, ArtPartner, Vogue, United Nations, Manila Times, Fotografiska Shanghai, Photo London, TEDx talks among other local and global publications, exhibitions, scientific journals, and living spaces.

© Gab Mejia

Project description

Gab’s project delves into the fraught state and history of the Philippine forests through the declining ecological rituals and oral traditions of the Filipino indigenous queers and women shamans (Babaylan).

Follow Choulay’s work on her website or on Instagram @mechchouly

EMERGING CATEGORY – Aziziah Diah Aprilya (Indonesia)

Aziziah Diah Aprilya is a photographer, writer, and art and cultural practitioner based in Makassar, Indonesia. She works with her city’s art community, urban study collective, publishers and archives initiatives. Her projects explore the city, communities and women through spaces, memories, archives and inheritance.

© Aziziah Diah Aprilya

Project description

Aziziah’s proect explores the effects of reclamation projects along the coast of her home city, Makassar, in Indonesia. It aims to highlight the historical and cultural connections with the sea that have been disrupted because of land reclamation, and the resilience and empowerment strategies of coastal women in Makassar.

EMERGING CATEGORY – Geela Garcia (Philippines)

Geela Garcia is a Filipino freelance photographer and multimedia journalist based in Manila, Philippines. Her photographic work, which documents stories of women, food sovereignty, and the environment, aims to write history from the experience of its makers.

©Geela Garcia

Project description

Geela’s project investigates the Philippines’ relationship with locally produced salt. It focuses on communities in the Philippines with a historical and cultural relationship with salt production. By extension, it looks at issues of food sovereignty, food security, and the personal stories of salt makers.

The selection panel also gave special mentions to the following individuals:

OPEN CATEGORY – Min Ma Naing (Myammar)

Min Ma Naing is a Myanmar exile artist and photographer who began her
photographic journey as a press photographer at Myanmar Times. She later shifted her focus to personal stories and a more immersive, slow journalism approach. She co-founded the first women’s photographer collective in Myanmar to promote equality in the male-dominated photography industry.
Her artistic practice explores emotions and memory in the human experience, often adopting a collaborative approach with the community. In addition to image-making, she also employs photographs as art objects. Her books, such as “Sorry, Not Sorry” and “Of Solons and Ashes,” have been showcased at several photobook exhibitions.

Due to the political situation in Myanmar, she uses the temporary pseudonym Min Ma Naing, which means “the king cannot beat you.” Her work intertwines the personal and political, capturing the essence of her journey amidst upheaval.

Min Ma Naing’s project explores the personal journey of healing through reconnection. The project discusses the challenges of being constantly in flux.

EMERGING CATEGORY – Mắt Bét (Vietnam)

Mắt Bét (born 1995) is a self-taught photographer from a coastal region of Vietnam, currently based in Ho Chi Minh City. Influenced by the natural environment place of birth, her practice
focuses on exploring the connection between humans and nature, as well as between humans themselves. Through the medium, she aims to understand human and the environment, confront her own fears, and cultivate openness, acceptance, appreciation and
empathy for the familiar and unfamiliar.

A Heart Moved by a Dance
Through the bustling underground nightlight of the Saigon youth community, Mắt Bét’s project examines how music can be used to understand oneself and build openness, acceptance, and trust, blurring gender boundaries.