Art Taaalkssss: Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

The cross-disciplinary practice of Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa (born in Guatemala) encompasses performance, sound, drawing, printmaking and sculpture to explore aspects of loss, displacement, and cultural resistance. His work often explores how intimacy both marks and subverts forms of collective mythmaking, which manifest themselves through dreams, architecture, abstraction, theater, and spirituality.

Ramírez-Figueroa’s work often brings together performance and storytelling with sculptures and paintings that address the imaginaries of pre-Columbian civilizations, ecology, evangelism, and imperialism. Attending to how intimacy marks and subverts forms of collective imaginary and mythmaking, the artist uses non-narrative accounts to offer glimpses of his personal experience of the Guatemalan history—particularly the country’s civil war from 1960 to 1996 and in which members of his family took an active part—while distancing himself from a documentary take on history. This has led the artist to create fable-like situations, which combine memories and visions from his childhood with pathos and humor, and that address such events as the genocide of Mayan populations, the infiltration of Mormon missionaries in Guatemala, and the country’s contemporary followers of apocalyptic conspiracies. For Art Taaalkssss, Ramírez-Figueroa will introduce his practice and interests, discussing how they bring together the personal and the political, the sculptural and the performative, the comic and the tragic to engage with the past and present of his home country.