About Luis Carlos Tovar
Colombia. 1979.
Luis Carlos Tovar is a visual artist working and living between Paris and Bogotá. His main topic of investigation are landscape, discontinuous geographies and changing cartographies. Especially interested in post-photography and archives, he explores the creation processes of otherness and how personal memories shape collective memory. His film Undo was presented at MACRO in Rome and received the IILA Award (2015). His project Cartographies of Escape (2015-2018) regarding freedom of movement, traces the exile routes of African migrants in Europe. Luis Carlos Tovar exhibited in Rome (MACRO, 2016), in Madrid (Museo de Arte Alcobendas, 2018) and in Paris (Cité Internationale des Arts, 2019). He has been awarded the Photoespaña Discovery Prize (2017), selected for the Photographic residencies at Musée du Quai Branly (2018), and nominated for the Pictet Prize (2019). He recently won the Elysée Prize (2018-20) which enabled him to publish Jardín de mi Padre in 2020. The starting point of this project was the kidnapping of his father by the FARC in 1980 in Colombia, and the search for a missing photograph: a Polaroid sent as a proof of life to his family 40 years ago.
