Wawi Navarroza
Wild at Heart
Recognized as one of the leading contemporary photographers in Southeast Asia, Wawi Navarroza is known for her distinctive colorful bricolage and cross-cultural artistic language that explores themes of female identity, regional culture, and the essence of photography. Wild at Heart, her latest solo exhibition will be unveiled at Fotografiska Shanghai.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
This exhibition showcases works from Wawi Navarroza's recent series, including As Wild as We Come, Tropical Gothic, and Neo-Tropikal Tapestry, alongside fabric installations derived from her works, offering an immersive experience for audiences.
At the core of Navarroza’s practice is the idea of the female creator. Through self-portraiture and the use of her own body as an artistic medium, she challenges conventional narratives of femininity. She incorporates textiles, interior décor, and handmade craft into her photographic compositions, addressing the significance of women’s work and its potent meanings. Her work is not only a redefinition of female identity but also a bold expansion of artistic expression.
Born and raised in Manila, educated in the West, and have lived in Madrid and Istanbul, Navarroza’s transnational background infuses her work with both global perspectives and Asian contexts. Her large-format, tableau-style compositions blend self-portraiture with rich visual symbolism, reflecting the fluidity of identity, the nature of photography, and the convergence of regional cultures.
Wild at Heart will highlight her signature explorations on the literary “Tropical Gothic” and a post-colonial hybrid that oscillates between tradition and modernity, craft and mass production, the local and the global—challenging fixed notions of cultural representation.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Wawi Navarroza (b. 1979, Manila, Philippines) is a lens-based artist recognized as one of the foremost names in contemporary Southeast Asian art known for her vibrant large format photographic tableaus and self-portraits. Informed by post-colonial dialogue, globalization and her experiences as transnational, female and Filipina, Navarroza creates kaleidoscopic in-studio bricolage, mise-en-scène, and camera techniques that echo the flatness and polychrome evident as the heritage and birthright of oriental art. Navarroza’s images emphasize the often overlooked power of symbolic allegory, folk memory, and imaginations of the exoticized “East” to create a rich visual lexicon of crisscrossing references and riddles. Her work serves as testament to the various facets and stages of the women's narrative,underlining woman as world-maker and active participant to art history. 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.
She is the recipient of the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship Grant New York, Lucas Artists Fellowship Award for Visual Arts San Francisco and national awards such as the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists Award and Ateneo Art Awards, and recently a nominee for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2023. Her work has been exhibited in museums internationally including the National Gallery of Singapore, the National Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan), and in galleries in Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, London, Spain, Italy, and Russia. Wawi Navarroza has been based in Madrid, Istanbul and is currently living and working in Manila, Philippines.