MADRID.- The work of Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa (Guatemala City, Guatemala, 1978) fuses sculptural installation, video and performance to open a reflection on his own biography and on his country’s turbulent history, marked by different forms of violence and armed conflict. Ramírez-Figueroa’s practice draws from Latin American political activism and experimental theatre, calling into question established and entrenched narratives which have emerged on specific episodes in the recent past.

Through the physicality of bodies and staged environments that envisage fantasy and reality, the artist revisits his own traumas and those of a country shaped by colonial extractivism, civil war and the social imbalance of the Indigenous population.

With an absurd and humorous approach not without a certain coarseness, Naufus evokes themes related to identity, the body and cultural history which operate beyond the specific context of Guatemala, yet without losing sight of the senselessness of the displacement and exile of his own family and their forced emigration to Vancouver in the 1980s.

This, the most complete exhibition on Ramírez-Figueroa’s work in Spain to date, explores the complexity and richness of his artistic narrative by virtue of an exceptional series of works which prompt new readings and approaches to a unique creative practice. Further, it includes a new and ambitious project in which the artist revisits his own past as an oneiric stage of collective memory, interweaving colonial violence inflicted on the Ch'olti people and silent genocide in Guatemala resulting from a protracted civil war lasting four decades in the second half of the last century.

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa lives and works in Guatemala City. His work has been exhibited at museums and art centres around the world, for instance the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá – MAMBO, Bogotá (2023), The Power Plant, Toronto (2020), New Museum, New York (2018), CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux (2017), the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2016), Tate Modern, London (2015) and Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2013), among others.

The agreement signed between the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and the TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation—one of the leading international foundations for contemporary art and public engagement, established in 2002 by philanthropist and patron Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza—includes the joint commission and production of the series Cuna y arrullo, on loan from the TBA21 Collection.

The collaboration also encompasses the commission of a performance piece, De espiral en espiral, specially created for the occasion by Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, which will be presented at the Museum on September 11. This performance interweaves European colonial history with the artist’s intimate family lineage, revisiting the production and symbolic use of playing cards.

The exhibition’s public program—featuring talks, screenings, and more—is organized by the Museum’s Public Programs Department in collaboration with the ICAC (The Cader Institute of Central American Art, Instituto Cáder de Arte Centroamericano).