REQUIEM FOR MIRRORS AND TIGERS
NAUFUS RAMÍREZ-FIGUEROA
CURATED BY SUSAN GIBB
FACILITATED BY GLENN ALTEEN
FEBRUARY 22 – APRIL 21, 2018
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grunt gallery
350 E 2nd Ave #116
Vancouver, BC
Phone: (604) 875-9516
Email: communications@grunt.ca
grunt.ca

grunt gallery is pleased to announce the Soft Launch of 'Requiem for Mirrors and Tigers,' an exhibition of a series of six documented video performances by Guatemalan-Canadian artist Ramírez-Figueroa's performance-based works captured as moving images. The exhibition will open on February 22 and run until April 21, 2018. grunt is open every week from 12-5pm, Tuesday - Saturday.

Requiem for Mirrors and Tigers was commissioned by the Corpus Network and produced in association with If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam. The series features the artist working both solo and with an ensemble in an ethereal and captivating series of performances. For Requiem, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa developed a cycle of new performance works. Across the punctuated moments of the cycle, Ramírez-Figueroa used his body and direct action to perform a series of images related to the history of the Guatemalan Civil War. Approaching the Civil War from a personal position, he has softened these images through abstraction and humour, while attempting to use the intensity of the performance schedule to push beyond the immense force of the collective and inscribed memory of the war’s history. Beyond the live performances, the cycle of works form a collection of videos.
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About the Artist:
Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa lives and works in Berlin and Guatemala City. He was born in Guatemala City in 1978 and immigrated to Vancouver in the early 1980’s. In 2006 he received a BFA in Media Arts from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and, in 2008, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was also a postgraduate researcher at Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, the Netherlands, in 2013. He has had recent solo exhibitions at CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; DAAD Galerie, Berlin (2017); and Gasworks, London (2015). Group exhibitions include São Paulo Biennial, Venice Biennale; LACMA, Los Angeles (2017); Lyon Biennial; and EFA Project Space, New York (2015). He has participated in performance series at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2017); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2016); and Tate Modern, London (2015). In recognition of his achievement, Ramírez-Figueroa was awarded the Mies van der Rohe Award (2017); and a DAAD fellowship (2015-16).



grunt gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of The Canada Council for the Arts, The British Columbia Arts Council, BC Gaming and the City of Vancouver as well as our members, donors and sponsors. This work was commissioned and produced as part of Corpus, a network for performance practice. Corpus is: Bulegoa z/b, Bilbao; CAC, Vilnius; KW, Berlin; If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam; Playground, STUK and M - Museum Leuven; and Tate Modern, London. Corpus is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.