Antonio Paucar is a Peruvian multidisciplinary artist born in Huancayo and working between Peru and Berlin. His practice combines performance, sculpture, installation and video with materials including alpaca wool, clay, hair and his own body. Drawing on Andean cultural knowledge and ritual, he examines Indigenous memory, environmental loss, migration and the pressures created by extractive economies and Western systems of representation. His actions are often deliberately spare, using repeated gestures or fragile materials to connect personal experience with wider political histories.
Paucar’s recent work received major international recognition when he won Artes Mundi 11 in January 2026. Presented across Mostyn and the National Museum Cardiff, his exhibition brought together textile sculptures and performance films. La Energía Espiral del AYNI II used a black-and-white alpaca-wool spiral and video to explore reciprocity and collective making, while El Corazón de la Montaña addressed ecological damage and shrinking glaciers in Peru’s Huaytapallana range. Another work recorded the traces of a handstand against a gallery wall, leaving clay footprints as evidence of bodily movement through place. Across these projects, Paucar brings ancestral knowledge into conversation with contemporary art without treating tradition as static. His work links land, language and the body, asking how art can sustain memory while responding to climate change, violence against Indigenous communities and cultural displacement.