Last year, the Zimbabwean artist Richard Mudariki was hampered in his efforts to present his project exploring the issue of access in the art world in Basel, when he was denied a visa. This year, Mudariki has been able to attend, but the enduring relevance of Art World Passport has been made clear once more, with staff from a gallery just metres from his stand at Africa Basel fair being denied entry to Switzerland.
A sign on an empty booth in the fair (as of 16 June) notes that Umoja Art Gallery from Uganda’s “participation remains impossible due to the denial of visa.” It continues: “An empty booth stands as a reminder that despite the ambition of a global art ecosystem, physical borders and administrative barriers still determine whose voices can be present”.
Speaking to The Art Newspaper, the gallery’s John Hillary Balyejusa explains that he and a colleague went through a roughly two-month process—requiring them to travel to the Swiss embassy in Nairobi as there is not one in Kampala—to apply for their visas. Less than a week before they were due to travel, they received a rejection letter.
Balyejusa says: “It’s a bit disappointing, we’ve been preparing for this fair since last year; it takes so much effort and even financially it’s very taxing and yet we get a very vague response from the embassy.”
He adds that while this was not referenced in the embassy’s response, many people from Uganda have been denied travel visas due to the recent Ebola outbreak in the country (the country has reported 19 confirmed cases and one probable case to date, according to the UN, though no new case has been reported since 5 June). The Swiss embassy in Nairobi was contacted for comment.
The works that the gallery had intended to bring—which included work by the Congo-born, Uganda-based artist Makano—are still being shipped to Africa Basel. “We have had to hire someone who will be in the booth to take care of it,” Balyejusa says. At the time of writing, however, the works were still being processed in Basel and have not yet reached the fair.
Mudariki, meanwhile, is in Basel having travelled through France. He is presenting his Art World Passport project in two venues: at Africa Basel, for galleries specialising in art from Africa and its diaspora, and in a dedicated “art world embassy” at Gerbergasse 82. In both places, visitors can purchase a passport-like booklet, in which they document their experiences at art events around the world by adding their own doodles, comments and photographs to the pages. Buyers can also purchase stamps that give access to the city’s fairs and museums this week.
Richard Mudariki in his booth at Africa Basel
Courtesy of Richard Mudariki
The project, launched at 1:54 art fair in New York in 2024, has a symbolic element too. Mudaraki explains it is a platform for people to connect and interact, and also “to have a discussion about migration, about some of these inequalities that exist because I hold a passport from a Global South country. Why do these things happen? Who sets these rules? Can we challenge it?”
On the denial of Balyejusa and his colleague’s visa, Mudaraki—who ran his project via video link last year, after his own cancelled trip—also notes the amount of investment that is put into applications, and how disappointing it must be for “artists who were very keen to be shown”. He adds: “What is interesting is everybody’s talking about the World Cup, where there are issues of visas and players not being able to travel. So there is another link: it’s not just creatives, its sportspeople as well.”
In the future, he hopes to run a call-out to Art World Passport holders, asking them to send in their passports to form an installation. “It would be interesting to find out what themes there were in a five-year period of time,” he says. “What were people recording, what were people travelling to? What were the popular fairs, artists and exhibitions in that period? The passports will definitely give us, I think, a better understanding of the times that we were in.”
