The Power Plant

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 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.