(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. |