Wawi Navarroza

(she/her)
b 1979, Manila, Philippines
Lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey

Self-portraiture is a genre frequently adopted by Wawi Navarroza in her artistic oeuvre. Often large-format and compositionally crowded with culturally coded symbols, Navarroza’s photographic tableaux vivant are visually spectacular, carefully staged portraits of the artist in relation to her surroundings. In her self-portrait dedicated to her late grandfather, however, Navarroza takes a more pared-down approach. Here, the artist offers an intimate and smaller-scale image bathed in deep earthy tones of mahogany, maroon and sepia. With a handwritten letter attached along the lower edge of the work, intended for the viewer’s eyes, Navarroza draws onlookers into what feels like a deeply personal and private web of gazes. Between the lens of two cameras—one pictured, and the other through which we peer— Navarroza’s wandering gaze, and the direct stare of Navarroza’s grandfather from a photograph-within-a-photograph, we are momentarily invited into a shared space and time, through Navarroza’s act of documenting self, ancestry and craft.

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
ed. 8/10