Wawi Navarroza is a Filipina lens-based artist recognized as one of the foremost names in contemporary Southeast Asian art today. She is known for her vibrant large format photographic tableaus, landscapes and self-portraits which speak of the hybridity of identity, photography, and place.
With 25 years of art practice in photography, she has developed her own visual language that combines tableau vivant with in-studio mise en scène, lighting and lens-work that create collage-like pieces. She plays with the medium and her hand is seen in all stages of the work including the hidden deliberate cuts-and-pastes within the digital image and in the choice of exacting artist frames.
Born and raised in Manila and educated with higher education in the West, Navarroza draws upon her lived experience as a female artist, Filipino, Asian, and transnational in creating her kaleidoscopic compositions that echo the flatness and polychrome drawn from the heritage and birthright of oriental art. Navarroza’s images emphasize the often overlooked power of symbolic allegory, folk memory, and rethinking tropes of the exoticized “East” to create a rich visual lexicon of criss-crossing references and riddles. She champions textile, interiors, and “women’s work” in her materials and uses her own corporeal body as an artistic medium, underlining sovereign self representation and agency through self-portraits. Her body of work serves as a testament to the various facets and stages of the women's narrative, portraying woman as creator.
She studied photography in De La Salle University, Manila, International Center of Photography New York and Masters in Contemporary Photography awarded by the Instituto Europeo di Design Madrid. Among numerous awards, she has received the Lucas Fellowship Award for Visual Arts in San Francisco, Asian Cultural Council Fellowship Award (NYC), nominee Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2023.
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 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, finalist for Singapore Museum Signature Art Prize, WMA Commission Hong Kong and Sovereign Asian Art Prize, and Leica Oskar Barnack Awards nominee, 2023. 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.