Artworld Passport | Investec Cape Town Art Fair

20 - 22.02.2026

Artworld Passport is a single conceptual artwork by Richard Mudariki that unfolds across multiple holders, geographies, and institutions. Although it exists in numerous physical artworld passports, the work itself is singular. Each passport is not an independent object but a distributed fragment of one unified artistic work. At its core, the Artworld Passport interrogates mobility within the global art ecosystem. In an industry built on biennales, art fairs, residencies, and international circulation, freedom of movement remains unevenly distributed. For many artists and cultural workers, especially from the Global South, access to these spaces is shaped by visa regimes, economic hierarchies, and geopolitical realities. The passport - a bureaucratic instrument of permission and restriction - becomes the central metaphor. This is The the first time in Africa that the Artworld. passport is being presented, following successful presentations during Frieze Week New York (2024) and Art Basel Week (2025).

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This artwork functions as a participatory archival sculpture. Each issued passport is activated by its holder: stamped, written on, drawn on, carried, photographed, and presented at cultural institutions. With every interaction, the artwork expands. Every holder contributes to a growing archive that documents who moves, who participates, and how access is negotiated in real time.

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Rather than producing a static object, the artist has created a distributed structure. The division of the work into multiple units does not fragment it conceptually. Instead, it allows the artwork to operate as a living network. The totality of the work exists in the collective circulation of all passports. It is singular in authorship but plural in embodiment.

In this way, the Artworld Passport extends the lineage of conceptual and socially engaged art practices, where the artwork resides not only in material form but in systems, participation, and documentation. The passport becomes both artefact and action, an object of display and a tool of engagement.

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As holders accumulate stamps, content and institutional encounters, the project builds a real-time record of a specific historical moment in global art mobility. It documents the politics of access in the 21st-century art world: a period defined by globalisation, migration debates, economic disparity, and shifting power structures. The archive produced is not retrospective; it is unfolding as the artwork circulates.

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