(b. 1979, Philippines) is a visual artist/professional photographer based in Manila, Philippines. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from De La Salle University with a specialisation in Photography. She has received a number of awards such as the Prix de la Photographie Paris (2009) and two award-winning solo exhibitions: POLYSACCHARIDE: The Dollhouse Drama, 2005 and SATURNINE: A Collection of Portraits, Creatures, Glass, and Shadow, 2007 which was cited as the winner of the Ateneo Art Awards 2007. Last year,
Navarroza was awarded the first Asian Cultural Council-Silverlens Fellowship Grant which sent her to New York City and the International Center of Photography to further her research and practice in contemporary photography/art. Upon her return to Manila in October 2009, she mounted another solo exhibition Perhaps it was possibly because at Silverlens Gallery in Manila. Outside the Philippines, Navarroza has exhibited in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia. Navarroza is a lecturer at De La Salle University Manila, College of Liberal Arts.

Curator's note:

Wawi Navarroza's re-enactment of horrific political violence that occurred in Maguindanao, Southern Philippines is a complex questioning of photography. Central to Navarroza's critique is the position of photography as a creative medium inextricably linked to its capacity for truth and communication. Her elaborately constructed tableau scene depicts the massacre of 57 people including politicians, journalists, lawyers, aides and unsuspecting motorists who were brutally tortured and killed whilst on their way to file for candidacy for an opposition leader in the upcoming election. The event was first broadcast through amateur mobile phone photographer sent to news outlets.

Navarroza restages this scene, using Francisco de Goya's monumental painting, The Third of May, 1808, depicting the execution of Spanish rebels during Napoleon's political occupation of the country, as a starting point for her work. Titled Not Today, the work is an exercise of what Navarroza calls 'epic fakeness', a re-enactment of real events, in a manner that purposefully seeks forgery. The artist digitally manipulates every detail of
the image to create a composite of the recent past. She mixes cameos of actual nurses, journalists and fashion designers as a decadent theatrical embellishment with anonymous actors to create her cast of horrors. This mixture of real people portraying themselves and actors masquerading as others is all part of the inward focus of Navarroza's lens on photography. In a mutinous gesture, she violently reveals photography's failure to depict
the real.

However, in a twist of fate, this image has been used as a form of advocacy
and was displayed as a billboard in Edsa, a busy thoroughfare in Manila. In this context the image of real people, of an actual setting, will be given the very validation Navarroza is trying to destabilise. The power of the subject, currently rooted in national consciousness then becomes a conduit for activism, and for truth. This is the hall of mirrors the artist tries to
highlight, a stage of simulacra, the parallel universe of photography.