Wawi Navarroza

(b. 1979, Philippines)

Wawi Navarroza is a Filipina lens-based artist known for her photographic practice, particularly her intricatew compositions and self-portraits. Through elaborate sets, arranged objects and considered lighting, she creates images that explore the relationships between identity, cultural memory, and place. Informed by material history, post-colonial dialogue, globalisation and her experiences as transnational, female, Southeast Asian and Filipina, she creates multi-layered in-studio bricolage with camera and lighting techniques that unapologetically reclaim the heritage of polychrome in oriental art.

Navarroza’s visual language emphasizes the often-overlooked power of symbolic allegory and folk memory through her rich lexicon of crisscrossing cultural references and riddles. Her work serves as a testament to the various facets and stages of the woman’s narrative, underlining the woman as a world-maker and active participant in history. She champions textiles, 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—revealing the female artist not just behind the camera, but bravely in front of it.

Her work has been exhibited at the National Gallery of Singapore and the National Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan, and in the collections of The Getty Museum, the International Center of Photography, the Lumi Photography Museum, the Central Bank of the Philippines, the Metropolitan Museum of the Philippines, the Ateneo Art Gallery, Menarco Vertical Museum, Monsoon Southeast Asia, the Ayala Art Collection, and the Akeroyd Collection. Among her distinctions are the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists Award, the Ateneo Art Awards and the Alexander Tutsek Stiftung Photography Grant in 2025. She also founded THOUSANDFOLD, a Manila-based photobook library and platform supporting photographic education and emerging artists.