An artwork that reimagines mobility, authorship, and belonging across the global art world
30 April 2026
Arriving in Venice at a moment when the art world stages its most visible circuits of exchange, ‘ArtWorld Passport’ resists the conventions of exhibition-making. Conceived by Zimbabwean artist Richard Mudariki, it is not so much an exhibition as it is an artwork in motion. Part document, part performance, part social sculpture, the passport transforms the bureaucratic apparatus of travel into a speculative tool for reimagining access and authorship.
Operating as a living system, passport holders will be able to collect stamps, signatures, drawings and traces from artists, exhibitions, pavilions and encounters across the Venice Biennale. Each mark records a moment of presence, yet also gestures to the uneven conditions under which movement is permitted or restricted. In Venice, where mobility appears effortless for some and fraught for others, the project sharpens its resonance.
Rather than presenting fixed objects, ‘ArtWorld Passport’ unfolds through participation. It exists in the hands of those who carry it, inscribe it, and extend its reach. In doing so, it collapses distinctions between artist and audience, object and process, institution and network.
What emerges is both poetic and pointed. The passport becomes a site where questions of belonging, visibility, and circulation are continuously negotiated. Not a container of art, but art itself, it proposes a world where mobility is authored collectively and where every journey leaves a trace.
The ArtWorld Passport Desk opens soon at the Venice Biennale 2026. For more information, please refer to the official website.
Important note: ‘ArtWorld Passport’ is not a government-issued passport and is not recognised as an official travel or identity document. It cannot be used for entry at any borders or checkpoints, but instead functions as a participatory artwork.
