AKSARA 2026 Invites Cartoonists to Explore Nusantara and the World’s Writing Systems
The international exhibition in Indonesia invites cartoonists, illustrators, typographers and designers to turn traditional scripts into a subject for contemporary visual expression.
Open Call · Indonesia · 2026
When writing itself becomes the subject
AKSARA 2026 is bringing together cartoon, illustration, typography and calligraphy around a subject rarely seen in international open calls: the writing systems of Indonesia and the wider world.
An international exhibition in Indonesia is inviting artists to look at writing not simply as a means of communication, but as visual material in its own right.
Titled AKSARA — Nusantara & The World Scripts, the project is open to cartoonists, illustrators, designers, typographers, painters and other artists working across several forms of graphic expression.
The exhibition focuses on Nusantara scripts and non-Latin writing systems from around the world. Its stated aim is to draw the attention of younger generations, particularly Gen Z, to Indonesian scripts that remain in use today.
Seven Indonesian writing traditions at the centre
The call specifically highlights seven writing traditions from Indonesia: Javanese or Hanacaraka, Sundanese, Balinese, Lontara, Batak, Lampung and Pegon.
Javanese / Hanacaraka · Sundanese · Balinese · Lontara · Batak · Lampung · Pegon
Artists from outside Indonesia are invited to work with these traditions, but the brief is not restricted to them. International participants may also respond to non-Latin scripts originating in their own countries.
That makes the premise broader than a survey of Indonesian writing. It opens the exhibition to different relationships between language, image and identity, while allowing artists to approach scripts through their own visual traditions.
Cartoon meets typography and calligraphy
AKSARA is not structured as a conventional international cartoon competition. The organisers describe it as an international exhibition, and its open call deliberately crosses several disciplines.
Entries may take the form of posters, typography, calligraphy, cartoons or illustrations. That range gives artists considerable room to interpret the theme, from a single graphic idea to work in which the form of the script itself becomes the image.
The interdisciplinary approach is particularly relevant to cartooning, where lettering and drawing have always shared the same space. In AKSARA, however, the relationship is reversed: writing is not necessarily there to explain the drawing. It can become the drawing.
AKSARA 2026 — Submission Details
Send artworks to: aksara2026stmm@gmail.com
Artists may submit up to five works. Entries should be prepared vertically at A3 size, 300 DPI, in JPG or PDF format.
A different kind of international open call
International cartoon calls frequently return to broad subjects such as peace, climate, democracy or technology. AKSARA takes a narrower route, starting with the shapes through which language itself is recorded.
That specificity is what makes the project interesting. A writing system carries history before an artist adds anything to it. Its forms can reveal geography, religion, cultural exchange and changing patterns of everyday use.
By opening the project to artists outside Indonesia, AKSARA also gives the theme room to travel. The resulting exhibition could place Indonesian scripts beside visual responses to writing systems from other parts of Asia and the wider world, connected not by a common alphabet but by the idea of writing as image.
For cartoonists accustomed to combining words and pictures, that is a familiar relationship approached from an unusual direction.
