Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa operates at the border between performance and installation art. His works often seem like enclosed sets brought to life via the performative, or they may, as in his recent exhibition “Shit-Baby and the Crumpled Giraffe,” appear as the remnants of a past event, shaped through an act of remembering, analyzing and contextualizing one’s (national) history through personal memory.

Ramírez-Figueroa was born in Guatemala in 1978—that is, in the middle of its lengthy civil war of 1960–96. His practice has long been marked by that history. But only in this latest work has