Self-portraits in Polychrome

Known for her large-format photographic tableaus and self-portraits, Wawi Navarroza holds her first-ever solo exhibition in the United States.

Words Sean Carballo
March 6, 2024

“La Bruja (All the Places She’s Gone, Self-Portrait)”, 2019. Photo credit SILVERLENS

In the introduction to their trailblazing collection Self-Portraits: Twelve Filipina Artists Speak, editors Thelma B. Kintanar and Sylvia Mendez Ventura observed: “It is a reality of Philippine culture that otherness and dependence on men still define the lives of many women, and that in art, particularly, the male continues to set the standards.” This was the year 1999, and Kintanar and Ventura’s book, which deployed the informal interview format, scanned as an attempt to interrogate those standards by delving into the backgrounds, practices, and narratives of various Filipina artists, from Paz Abad Santos and Brenda Fajardo, to Phyllis Zaballero and Agnes Arellano.

Twenty-five years later, what are we to make of their assertion? How have those standards changed, has the playing field evened out somehow? What does it mean to explore gender politics in art today? How can femininity be harnessed not as an inert fact of being, but as a fluid kind of inquiry? Those questions which impelled Kintanar, Ventura, and their interlocutors, I find, are still resonant in 2024 as I look to the art of Filipinas like Len-Len, Nicole Tee, Pam Yan Santos, Catalina Africa, and many, many more.

Though their artistic grounding and methods may vary, these artists thrillingly locate their work within discourse of the female body and its myriad complexities.

Across the Self-Portraits anthology, topics of motherhood, marriage, domesticity and the task of balancing those demands with art recur—a “double burden,” Ventura termed it to Paz Abad Santos in their conversation. I thought about that phrase again upon reading the photographer and self-portraitist Wawi Navarroza’s poignant essay published last year at Vogue Philippines. Navarroza recalls her experience of giving birth to her son Gabriel during the thick of the pandemic, that turbulent yet shuttered period, and the identity crisis that ensued. “A private transformation was happening,” she wrote. “Dark night of the soul, in the cave we see a woman and an artist transfigured to a mother.”

This is an excerpt from Art+ Magazine Issue 89. To read the full story, get the latest issue available on collectibles by artplus, Shopee, and on select stores of National Bookstore and Fully Booked.