The participatory artwork by Zimbabwean artist Richard Mudariki transforms the language of visas, embassies, and border control into a reflection on who gets to move through the global art world—and who does not.
As the international art world converges on Basel this June for one of its busiest and most influential weeks of the year, a new project is inviting visitors to think differently about movement, access, and belonging.
During Art Basel Week 2026, the Art World Passport will establish two official locations in Basel: an Art World Passport Embassy in the city centre and an Art World Passport Consulate within Africa Basel Art Fair. Created by Zimbabwean artist and ArtHARARE founder Richard Mudariki, the project takes one of the most powerful symbols of international mobility—the passport—and transforms it into a participatory artwork, archive, and membership object that examines who is able to move through the global art world and under what conditions.
Visitors will be able to apply for passports, collect stamps, undergo visa-style interviews, and engage with a growing international community of passport holders. While the project adopts the language and rituals of diplomacy and travel documentation, its ambitions extend far beyond performance. At its core, the Art World Passport is a critical reflection on the systems of access, privilege, exclusion, and cultural mobility that continue to shape participation in contemporary art.
The project arrives at a moment when African artists are receiving unprecedented international attention. Across biennials, museums, auctions, and art fairs, contemporary African art has become one of the most closely watched areas of the global cultural landscape. Yet despite increasing visibility, many artists, curators, researchers, and cultural professionals from across Africa continue to face significant barriers when attempting to travel internationally. Visa restrictions, lengthy application processes, financial requirements, and administrative hurdles remain an often-overlooked reality behind the celebration of global cultural exchange.
By recreating these systems within an artistic framework, Mudariki asks visitors to confront a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the contemporary art world: while artworks often travel freely across borders, the people who create, interpret, and present them frequently do not.
A Passport for the Art World
The Art World Passport is designed as both a collectible object and an evolving participatory artwork. Available as a specially designed booklet, it functions as a symbolic travel document through which holders can collect official stamps and visas from participating fairs and institutions throughout Art Basel Week.
The project’s central hub, the Art World Passport Embassy, will be located at Gerbergasse 82 in Basel’s historic city centre. There, visitors will be able to apply for passports, receive official stamps, participate in conversations around artistic mobility, and engage with the broader ideas underpinning the project.
A temporary Consulate will also operate within Africa Basel Art Fair at Klybeck 610, allowing visitors to collect pre-ordered passports and apply for special Art Basel Week visas and stamps.
Passport holders can apply for an Africa Basel Week Visa, which grants access to participating fairs and institutions throughout the week. Applicants are required to undergo a short interview process that deliberately mirrors the procedures associated with real-world visa applications. The process serves as a reminder of the bureaucratic systems that many cultural practitioners navigate when seeking access to international opportunities.
Through these gestures, the project transforms administrative procedures into artistic experiences, encouraging participants to consider the power structures embedded within everyday systems of mobility.
Richard Mudariki’s Reflection on Borders and Belonging
The Art World Passport emerges from the broader artistic practice of Richard Mudariki, a Zimbabwean-born artist, cultural producer, and founder of ArtHARARE.
Born in Seke, Zimbabwe, in 1985 and now based in Cape Town, South Africa, Mudariki has developed a distinctive visual language characterised by satire, symbolism, and social commentary. His work frequently explores questions of power, politics, identity, migration, and cultural belonging, often examining the realities and contradictions of contemporary African life.
Trained in archaeology, cultural heritage, museum studies, and painting, Mudariki approaches art through both historical and contemporary lenses. His practice regularly investigates the institutions and systems that shape how people understand identity, citizenship, and cultural participation.
The passport project extends these concerns into a participatory format. By transforming the passport—a document associated with permission, identity, movement, and exclusion—into an artwork, Mudariki creates a platform through which visitors can engage directly with the politics of mobility.
Rather than offering definitive answers, the project creates space for conversation, asking participants to consider how cultural access is granted, restricted, and negotiated in an increasingly interconnected world.
Why Mobility Remains One of the Art World’s Defining Questions
The significance of the Art World Passport lies not only in its format but in the broader questions it raises.
International contemporary art is often described as borderless. Major exhibitions bring together artists from dozens of countries, while collectors, galleries, and institutions operate across continents. Yet beneath this image of global connectivity lies a more uneven reality.
For many artists and cultural workers from Africa, mobility remains one of the most significant challenges to professional participation. Invitations to exhibitions, fairs, residencies, and conferences do not always guarantee the ability to attend. Visa applications can be costly, time-consuming, and unpredictable. Rejections can prevent artists from participating in events where their work is being exhibited and discussed.
These experiences are rarely reflected in conversations about the global art market, despite their profound impact on artistic careers and cultural exchange.
The Art World Passport brings these issues into public view. By placing questions of access and movement at the centre of the visitor experience, the project encourages audiences to think critically about how opportunities are distributed and how cultural systems continue to reproduce inequalities inherited from broader geopolitical structures.
In doing so, it expands the conversation beyond travel itself. The project ultimately asks larger questions about visibility, representation, and participation. Who gets to be present in the rooms where cultural narratives are shaped? Who has access to networks of influence and opportunity? And how might these systems be imagined differently?
Why Basel Is the Ideal Stage
Few places provide a more fitting setting for these questions than Basel.
Each year, Art Basel transforms the Swiss city into the centre of the international art world. Collectors, museum directors, curators, critics, journalists, and artists arrive from across the globe, making Basel one of the most concentrated gatherings of cultural power anywhere in the world.
Within this environment, questions of access become particularly visible.
The Art World Passport inserts itself directly into this context, encouraging visitors to reflect on the structures that enable some forms of movement while restricting others. By establishing both an Embassy and a Consulate during the week, the project effectively creates an alternative geography within Basel—one that imagines cultural citizenship beyond traditional national boundaries.
Its partnership with Africa Basel Art Fair further reinforces these themes. As a platform dedicated to contemporary African and Afro-diasporic art, Africa Basel has positioned itself as a space for dialogue, visibility, and exchange during one of the art world’s most important annual gatherings. The presence of the Art World Passport within the fair extends that conversation, connecting questions of artistic representation with broader discussions around mobility and participation.
Beyond a Symbolic Passport
Ultimately, the Art World Passport is not about travel documents.
It is about participation.
It asks who is able to move through the institutions, fairs, museums, and networks that shape contemporary culture. It examines the often invisible systems that determine who gains access and who remains outside. And it challenges visitors to imagine new forms of cultural belonging that extend beyond the limits of nationality, bureaucracy, and institutional gatekeeping.
At a moment when contemporary African art is occupying an increasingly prominent place within global cultural discourse, Mudariki’s project serves as a timely reminder that visibility alone does not guarantee access. The ability to move, connect, collaborate, and participate remains one of the defining questions of the international art world.
Through the simple act of issuing a passport, the Art World Passport transforms a familiar bureaucratic object into a powerful artistic proposition—one that asks not where we come from, but how we might build a more connected and equitable cultural future.
