Wawi Navarroza is a Filipina contemporary artist with an international art practice known for her works in photography. Her works navigate self and surrounding as seen in her self-portraits, landscapes and installations. She is informed by tropicality within the dynamics of post-colonial dialogue, globalization, and the artist as a transnational agent. As a female artist, Southeast Asian and Filipino, her works transmute lived experience to the symbolic using material and studio techniques; creating images that explore the hybridity of identity, photography and place.
She has exhibited widely in the Philippines and internationally, including the National Museum of the Philippines, National Gallery of Singapore, Singapore Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Hangaram Museum (Korea), National Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan), Yogyakarta National Museum (Indonesia), Fries Museum of Contemporary Art & Museum Belvedere (Netherlands), Danubiana Museum (Slovakia), and in galleries in Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Laos, Cambodia, London, Spain, Italy, and Russia; with continued participation in international photography festivals and art fairs such as Art Basel HK.
Navarroza is currently nominated for the Leica Oskar Barnack Awards 2023 and has received a number of awards such as the Lucas Artists Fellowship Award for Visual Arts San Francisco, Asian Cultural Council Fellowship Grant New York, Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists Awards, Ateneo Art Awards, Lumi Photographic Art Awards Helsinki, and finalist for Singapore Museum Signature Art Prize, WMA Commission Hong Kong and Sovereign Asian Art Prize. Her works are in the collection of Bangko Central ng Pilipinas (Central Bank of the Philippines), Metropolitan Museum of the Philippines, Menarco Tower/The Vertical Museum at Bonifacio Global City, and Stora Enso Photography Museum in Oulu, Finland.
Her art has been surveyed in books such as “Photography Today” (Phaidon), “Contemporary Photography in Asia” (Prestel) and “Photography in South East Asia” by Zuang Wubin (NUS Press). Navarroza has been a strong proponent of the printed format as an extension of artistic work and with this, has published two books “DOMINION”and “Hunt & Gather, Terraria,” launched respectively at Offprint Paris and New York Book Fair PS1MoMA. In 2015, she founded Thousandfold, a contemporary photography platform and the first photobook library in Manila, with Thousandfold Small Press as its publishing arm promoting emerging talent. She is also recognized in her field as an educator and speaker, often invited to give workshops, masterclasses, talks, reviews on photography, art and visual culture, the most recent ones at UNESCO Dhaka (2019) and at the Atatürk Kültür Merkezi, Istanbul (2022) .
Navarroza is a graduate of Communications Arts at De La Salle University, Manila. Shortly after, she received continuing education at the International Center of Photography in New York City. For a few years she has been based in Spain where she finished her Masters in Contemporary Photography (Master Europeo de Fotografía de Autor), a scholarship awarded by Instituto Europeo di Design in Madrid. In recent years, Navarroza has been based between Istanbul and Manila.
Wawi Navarroza is represented by Silverlens Gallery (Manila/New York) and Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery (London/Berlin/Palm Beach).
CV is available upon request.