Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa was born in Guatemala City in 1978. He received a BFA in Media Arts from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver, in 2006, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. He was also a postgraduate researcher at Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, the Netherlands, in 2013. Working in drawing, performance, sculpture, and video, Ramírez-Figueroa explores the entanglement of history and form through the lens of his own displacement during and following Guatemala’s civil war of 1960–96. Borrowing from the languages of folklore, science fiction, and theater, he reframes historical events and protagonists. Ramírez-Figueroa’s A Brief History of Architecture in Guatemala (Breve Historia de la Arquitectura en Guatemala, 2010) is a performance featuring dancers in paper costumes based on three iconic structures in Guatemala—a Mayan pyramid, a colonial church, and the modernist National Bank of Guatemala. The performers begin by dancing to a traditional Guatemalan folk tune, their choreographed movements gradually dissolving into chaos, destroying the costumes. Here Ramírez-Figueroa examines the way in which architecture memorializes regimes of power—in this case, indigenous, colonialist, and modernist—and the related histories of exploitation. In this way, the aesthetics of the built environment offer a reminder of the conflicting and impermanent ideologies responsible for different architectural styles. Ramírez-Figueroa returns to these themes in more recent projects such as Costume Modules (2015), a series of works on paper paired with corrugated plastic sculptures depicting fragments of iconic buildings as modular cubes that viewers may rearrange. Another work, God’s Reptilian Finger (2015), explores the long history of religious imperialism and evangelism in Latin America by incorporating elements of Christian iconography into an immersive installation in which polystyrene and resin have been used to create absurdist faux-relics, the acidic coloration of which emerges under ultraviolet light. By thus emphasizing the constructed nature of cultural, religious, and historical signifiers, Ramírez-Figueroa also underscores the subjective nature of historical narrative in general, salvaging previously marginalized perspectives that present alternatives to the West’s otherwise all-pervasive influence. Ramírez-Figueroa has had solo exhibitions at Casa de América, Madrid (2011); Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart (2011); Gasworks, London (2015); and CAPC musée d'art contemporain, Bordeaux (2017). He has participated in the group exhibitions A History of Interventions, Tate Modern, London; Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (both 2014); Lyon Biennial; The School of Nature and Principle, EFA Project Space, New York (both 2015); São Paulo Biennial; and the Venice Biennale (2017). Ramírez-Figueroa has performed as part of the series “BMW Tate Live: Performance Room,” Tate Modern, London (2015); If I Can’t Dance Then I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2016); and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s “Latin American Circle Presents” (2017). He is the recipient of an Akademie Schloss Solitude fellowship (2011), a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2012), a DAAD fellowship in Berlin (2015–16), and the 2017 Mies van der Rohe Award. Ramírez-Figueroa lives and works in Berlin and Guatemala City.