Artwork: Self-Portrait for My Grandfather, the Photographer (after Frida Kahlo’s Portrait of My Father / Retrato de Mi Padre, 1951) 2007, Lambda C-print, 61 x 45.7 cm

Wawi Navarroza is an Istanbul-based Filipina multidisciplinary artist known for her works in photography. Her images navigate self and surrounding as seen in her works in constructed tableaus and self-portraits, as well as landscape and installation. She is informed by tropicality within the dynamics of post-colonial dialogue, globalisation, and the artist as a transnational agent. As a female artist, Southeast Asian and Filipino, her works transmute lived experience to the symbolic while probing materials and studio practice, exploring the hybridity of identity, photography and place.

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 with a Fellowship Grant from the Asian Cultural Council. She completed a Masters in Contemporary Photography (Master Europeo de Fotografía de Autor) in Spain with a scholarship awarded by Instituto Europeo di Design in Madrid.

Artist website: www.wawinavarroza.com

“The artist’s identity is plural” says Navarroza. Filipina, female, Asian, global she is a “worldly trans-national sponge”. Her photographs are constructed, staged tableaux in which she is both artist and subject, controlling the lighting and mise-en-scene. She “disrupts the continuity of seamless photographic image by quick imprecise digital cuts-and-pastes on selected areas of the image, reminding viewers that ultimately, we are looking at a constructed image.” The work is also a homage to her grandfather.

Compare this work with the Frida Kahlo painting she has appropriated and discuss similarities and differences. https://www.fridakahlo.org/portrait-of-my-father.jsp

What techniques has the artist used to convey a sense of nostalgia, loss or memory?

Look at Navarroza’s self portrait series on her website. In what ways might her work be characterised as a “conversation with art history”?

Think About/Discuss:

Why do you think an artist might choose to focus on the self-portrait in their work?Historically, and still today, many women artists have explored the subject of their own image – what reasons might there be for this?