Images on the Run | Through the Lens of Wawi Navarroza & Miti Ruangkritya

The early history of photography in Southeast Asia is largely defined by an ethnographic approach that attempted to “fix” the colonised body. In these images, the subject often remained rooted in space and in (developmental) time, while the photographer was highly itinerant. But what happens when the itinerant photographer is also the subject, or when the photographer turns their attention towards a subject matter that is in a highly agitated state of flux? This panel considers the works of artists Wawi Navarroza and Miti Ruangkritya against how photos are created, manipulated and circulated today via social media.

This panel discussion is moderated by Kenneth Tay (Assistant Curator, Singapore Art Museum), and organised in conjunction with the Gallery’s special exhibition “Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asian Art”.

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About the Speakers

MITI RUANGKRITYA is a visual artist whose photography practice incorporates video, text, and publishing in examining the notion of the City. Encompassing topics ranging political upheaval, ecological change, dislocation, and economic inequalities, his oeuvre chronicles personal responses to his everyday observations while communicating the urban urgencies of contemporary living. His utilisation of media beyond traditional digital and film photography elucidates the nature of image generation, presentation, and consumption in a world increasingly defined by the visual experience. He is the recipient of numerous awards and commendations, and his art practice and publications are represented in public and private collections and libraries worldwide. He lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand.

WAWI NAVARROZA is a Filipina contemporary artist with an international art practice known for her works in photography. Her works navigate self and surrounding as seen in her self-portraits, landscapes and installations. She is informed by tropicality within the dynamics of post-colonial dialogue, globalization, and the artist as a transnational agent. As a female artist, Southeast Asian and Filipino, her works transmute lived experience to the symbolic using material and studio techniques; creating images that explore the hybridity of identity, photography and place. Her works are surveyed in books “Photography Today” (Phaidon), “Contemporary Photography in Asia” (Prestel) and is currently nominated for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2023. Navarroza is also a speaker on art and visual culture, most recent at UNESCO Dhaka and at the Atatürk Kültür Merkezi, Istanbul. Navarroza was born and raised in Manila, has lived in Spain and is currently based between Manila and Istanbul.

KENNETH TAY is Assistant Curator at Singapore Art Museum. He writes on media histories, global infrastructures and logistics, and is the author of The Sea is All Highway (Temporary Press, 2019). His curatorial project, FLAT.SPACES (2018), examines the infrastructural critique in the work of Singaporean net-art collective tsunamii.net (2001‒2005). Presently, he is working on a curatorial project that looks into postwar Singapore’s relationship to oil and its global networks. He holds a MA in Media Studies from The New School.

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About “Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asian Art”

Photographs surround us every day and everywhere. They shape the way we see the world and the way we see ourselves. Explore the changing roles of photography in Southeast Asia—from its beginnings as a tool of European exploration to the “performance” of studio portraits; from the incomplete realities of war to the rise of fine art; and finally to the memes and selfies that saturate social media today.

Click here to find out more about the exhibition and its upcoming programmes: https://www.nationalgallery.sg/livingpictures