Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa was born in Guatemala City in 1978 and lives and works in Guatemala. At the age of six, he moved with his family to Canada during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996). His experiences of exile and displacement, together with the conflict’s continuing impact on Guatemalan society, have profoundly shaped his multidisciplinary practice, which encompasses performance, video, installation, sculpture, drawing and printmaking. Ramírez-Figueroa received a BFA in Media Arts from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver in 2006 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. In 2013, he undertook postgraduate research at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. His distinctions include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Franklin Furnace Fund award and fellowships from Akademie Schloss Solitude and the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. His work draws on personal memories, historical research, folklore, theatre, architecture, science fiction and spiritual traditions to reconsider narratives associated with Guatemala and the wider Mesoamerican region. Combining humour, absurdity and dreamlike imagery with modest or ephemeral materials, he explores colonialism, political violence, loss, cultural memory and resilience. His performances and installations frequently employ the body as a means of connecting intimate experience with broader histories of conflict and social rupture. Ramírez-Figueroa has presented solo exhibitions at institutions including Casa de América, Madrid; Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; Gasworks, London; CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux; The Power Plant, Toronto; the New Museum, New York; Kunsthalle Lissabon; and M Museum, Leuven. He has also participated in major international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale, the Gwangju Biennale and presentations at Tate Modern. In 2025, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid presented Espectros luminosos, and in 2026 the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented Lugar de Consuelo (Place of Solace), a multimedia work addressing the political and personal histories of Guatemala’s civil war. Across his practice, Ramírez-Figueroa transforms painful historical material through poetic, theatrical and often playful forms. Rather than reconstructing history as a stable account, his works reveal how memory is embodied, fragmented and continually reshaped across generations.