Artworld Passport at Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2026: Mobility, Multiplicity and the Performance of Access
- 11 hours ago
- 3 min read
by Wadzanai Machirirori
At the 2026 edition of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, the Artworld Passport returned not as a speculative proposition but as an activated system. The booth operated less as a commercial stand and more as an art border post, archive, and civic registration office. Throughout the week at the CTICC, dense queues formed as new passport holders waited to be issued, photographed, stamped, and entered into what has become one of the most unusual distributed artworks to emerge from the African continent in recent years.
The collaboration with Iziko Museums of South Africa marked a decisive institutional consolidation. During Cape Town Art Week, holders of the Artworld Passport were granted complimentary access to participating Iziko museums - South African National Art Gallery, Bo Kaap Museum, Slave Lodge, Old Town House and The South African Museum - a gesture that extended the artwork beyond the fair into the city’s cultural infrastructure. This built directly on the project’s prior engagements with museum contexts in Basel Switzerland (it allowed access into Kunstmuseum Basel, Haus der Elektronischen Künste and Fondation Beyeler), where the passport functioned as both artwork and access device. In Cape Town, the model matured, a privately initiated conceptual artwork interfacing directly with public institutions to materially expand cultural participation.
At its core, the Artworld Passport is singular. It is one artwork. Yet it exists across hundreds - now thousands - of physical art passports in circulation. Each artwork is not an edition in the conventional printmaking sense, but a fragment of a unified conceptual structure. The work unfolds through its holders. It operates across borders. It accumulates stamps, visas, annotations, and memories. Over the past three years, it has been activated across three continents - Africa, Europe, and North America - without losing its conceptual coherence. Its execution is singular; its usage is multiple. This distinction is critical.
The 2026 Investec Cape Town Art Fair fair amplified the work’s thematic urgency. Presented in the Cabinet/Records section of the fair, visitors openly shared their own histories of visa denials, delayed appointments, humiliating interrogations, and bureaucratic asymmetries. Artists from the continent described the cost of mobility - financial, psychological, temporal. Curators spoke of invitation letters that did not translate into embassy approvals. Collectors discussed the privilege embedded in passport hierarchies. Within this context, the act of issuing an Artworld Passport became both symbolic and performative: an alternative authorisation mechanism within the art ecosystem.
In one bizarre and telling incident, a United States citizen insisted that the artist stamp and sign his actual U.S. passport to authenticate his presence at the fair. The request blurred legal, artistic, and symbolic boundaries. While the official document could not be altered, the demand itself was revealing: it signalled a desire to collapse the distance between state-issued identity and artist-issued mobility. It demonstrated how deeply the project unsettles conventional notions of validation and authority.
The engagement throughout the week was overwhelming. Many holders articulated that the passport felt like permission - not from the state, but from themselves. A number of young visitors described it as a tool of self-authorisation, encouraging them to attend exhibitions, visit galleries, and enter museum spaces they might otherwise have perceived as inaccessible. The passport became both artefact and prompt. It did not merely document movement; it instigated it.
The significance of the fair context cannot be overstated. The Investec Cape Town Art Fair functions as a continental nexus where local and international art systems intersect. By situating the Artworld Passport within this arena - rather than outside it - the project directly interrogated the mobility structures that underpin the global art market: biennales, residencies, art fairs, and transnational circulation. The fair became a stage for examining who moves easily, who struggles, and who is excluded.
Mudariki’s next move extends beyond activation into consolidation. An Asian presentation is in development, positioning the work within another geopolitical context of mobility, creative labour flows, and creative economies. Parallel to this, the project is entering a detailed research and archival phase. Documentation, institutional dialogues, policy conversations, and economic mapping will underpin the next iteration. The Artworld Passport is evolving from performative gesture to long-term research platform examining mobility within the creative economy.
What began as a conceptual provocation has matured into a distributed institutional artwork with measurable public engagement. In Cape Town, amid dense crowds and relentless stamping, the project revealed something fundamental: mobility is not only about crossing borders. It is about participation, access, and the psychological threshold of entry.
The Artworld Passport issuing continues and new applications are available online via www.artworldpassport.com
Wadzanai Machirirori is a writer and blogger from Harare. She holds a BA in Media and Communication.
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