The art world claims to be borderless. This week in Basel, two African galleries proved it is not.
The Art of African Vision is produced by Africa.com. The story of African art is also, always, a story about who gets to move. Who gets to arrive, to exhibit, to be seen in the rooms where reputations are made and prices set. This newsletter follows that story wherever it leads: into the galleries and the embassies, the studios and the empty booths, the places African artists are welcome and the places they are not. The world is paying attention to African art. It is time for African art to set the terms of its own visibility.
The Empty Booth
There is a sign on an empty booth at Africa Basel this week. It reads: “participation remains impossible due to the denial of visa.” 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.
The booth belongs to Umoja Art Gallery, a contemporary art gallery founded in Kampala, Uganda in 2011. Its director, John Hillary Balyejusa, and a colleague spent roughly two months applying for Swiss visas, a process that required them to travel to the Swiss embassy in Nairobi, since there is no Swiss embassy in Kampala. Less than a week before they were due to travel, they received a rejection letter. The reason given was vague. Balyejusa suspects the Ebola outbreak in Uganda, which had recorded nineteen confirmed cases by early June, played a role, though the embassy’s letter did not say so.
The works Umoja had planned to bring are still being shipped to Basel. The gallery has hired someone to stand in the booth. At the time of writing, the works had not yet arrived from customs processing.
“It’s a bit disappointing,” Balyejusa told The Art Newspaper. “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.”
Just metres away from the empty Umoja booth stands the Art World Passport project by Zimbabwean artist Richard Mudariki. Last year, Mudariki was denied a Swiss visa to present this very project, which critiques the exclusionary systems that govern movement in the global art world. This year, he made it, travelling through France. He is presenting the project at two venues simultaneously: inside Africa Basel at Klybeck 610, and at a dedicated Art World Passport Embassy at Gerbergasse 82 in the city.
The proximity is almost too neat to be true. The artist who makes work about visa denials, standing metres from the gallery that was denied visas. “We must confront the illusion that the art world is a borderless space,” Mudariki has said. “It is not. It mirrors global inequalities unless we actively challenge them.”
In 2022, Africa had the highest visa rejection rate in the world: 30 percent of all applications refused, despite having the fewest applications per capita. The art world’s claims to global inclusivity run up, again and again, against this single, stubborn fact.
Artist Spotlight: Richard Mudariki and the Art World Passport
The Art World Passport is one of the most quietly radical art projects in the world right now, and it deserves more attention than it has received.
Conceived by Mudariki through his cultural platform artHARARE, the project reimagines the travel document as a collaborative artwork and participatory archive. Visitors purchase a passport-like booklet and use it to document their journeys through the art world, adding doodles, photographs, stamps, and comments at biennales, fairs, studio visits, and museum openings. In Basel this week, holders of the Art World Passport with the appropriate visa can gain access not only to Africa Basel but to selected partner institutions and fairs including Liste Art Fair and Museum der Kulturen.
But the project is more than a clever conceit. It is an archive. It records where people are travelling, what they are seeing, and which institutions they are encountering. Over time, it will become a document of who moves through the art world and who does not, of which countries appear on the stamps and which are conspicuously absent. The passports will, as Mudariki has said, give us a better understanding of the times we were in.
Born in Zimbabwe and based in South Africa, Mudariki has been making socially engaged work for more than two decades. His earlier practice focused on political satire and urban life in Zimbabwe. The Art World Passport represents a shift toward the systemic: not just depicting inequality, but making the experience of it visible to the people who benefit from not having to think about it.
When his visa was denied in 2025, his empty chair in Basel became the most potent part of the work. This year, his presence in Basel, metres from a gallery that could not make it, carries its own weight.
Deep Roots: African Artists and the Digital Frontier
While the visa crisis dominates conversations at Africa Basel this week, a parallel story is unfolding inside Art Basel itself. The fair’s Zero 10 digital art initiative, now in its second year, is expanding rapidly, raising a question that sits at the heart of African art’s next decade: where do African artists fit within the digital ecosystem?
Digital art, including augmented reality, virtual exhibitions, AI-generated work, and blockchain-based pieces, is attracting growing institutional interest globally. For African artists, the possibilities are real. Digital platforms reduce geographical barriers. An artist in Nairobi or Dakar can, in theory, reach a collector in New York without needing a visa, a shipping container, or a gallery in the right city.
But unequal access to technology remains a pressing reality. Reliable internet, specialised equipment, and funding for digital practice vary enormously across the continent. Participation in digital art ecosystems, like participation in physical art fairs, often reflects existing global inequalities rather than transcending them.
What is striking is that African artists who do engage with digital tools are not simply adopting global trends. Nigerian-American artist Victor Ehikhamenor uses digital collage and online archival imagery to explore memory, identity, and postcolonial history. Across the continent, artists are building virtual worlds, digital archives, and immersive works rooted in African cosmologies, oral traditions, and material cultures.
The digital frontier is real. But the access question does not disappear when the medium changes from canvas to screen. And while that conversation unfolds at Art Basel this week, it is worth noting what is happening in Hannover: Kenyan artist Kaloki Nyamai has three monumental textile works, each standing six metres high, installed in the Calder Hall of the Sprengel Museum, running through July 5. No digital platform, no algorithm, no blockchain. Just cloth, scale, and a Kenyan artist in one of Germany’s most significant modern art museums. Both paths matter.
On the Global Stage: Ibrahim Mahama and the Arnold Bode Prize
In April, Ibrahim Mahama was awarded the 2026 Arnold Bode Prize by the city of Kassel, Germany, one of Europe’s most respected honours in contemporary art. The prize is named after Arnold Bode, the founder of documenta, the exhibition held every five years in Kassel that is arguably the most intellectually serious recurring event in the global art world. The award comes with a cash prize of €10,000 and places Mahama among a select group of artists whose work has made a strong impact on global artistic discourse.
Previous recipients have included Nigerian-born American artist Olu Oguibe and Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. Mahama’s selection was made by the Board of Trustees and approved by the magistrate of Kassel.
We covered Mahama’s Art Basel Gold Award commission, The God of Small Things, in Issue 3. The Arnold Bode Prize, announced in April, adds another layer to a remarkable year for an artist who was also ranked number one in the Art Review Power 100 in 2025, the first African artist ever to hold that position. Three major international recognitions in a single twelve-month period: the Power 100 ranking, the Art Basel Gold Award, and now the Arnold Bode Prize.
What is worth noting, beyond the accumulation of honours, is what Mahama does with his platform. Beyond his studio practice, he has built a constellation of institutions in Tamale, Ghana: Red Clay Studio, the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art, and Nkrumah Volini, all of which support artists through residencies, workshops, and exhibitions. His international recognition is inseparable from his commitment to building the infrastructure that makes future recognition possible for others.
Museum Feature: Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and London
We featured the Goodman Gallery in Issue 3. This week, with Africa Basel in full swing and conversations about access dominating the field, it is worth returning to the institution that has done more than almost any other to argue, in the most commercially demanding rooms in the world, that African artists belong there.
Founded in Johannesburg in 1966, the Goodman Gallery has operated through apartheid and its aftermath, through the global art market’s long indifference to African contemporary art and its current enthusiasm for it. It represents William Kentridge, Zanele Muholi, and a roster of younger African artists reshaping what the global art world pays attention to. It now has spaces in London and New York, and is represented at Art Basel.
This week, in the context of Umoja Art Gallery’s empty booth, the Goodman represents a different kind of answer to the access question: not a protest or a project, but a long, patient, commercially successful argument that African art belongs in the rooms where money and attention converge. Both approaches matter. Neither is sufficient alone.
Goodman Gallery, 163 Jan Smuts Avenue, Johannesburg. goodman-gallery.com
Want to explore more institutions across the continent? Africa.com’s Museums of Africa guide is your country-by-country companion to heritage collections, contemporary art spaces, and cultural institutions from Cairo to Cape Town. Explore the full guide at africa.com
A Final Word
An empty booth in Basel. A passport project running metres away. An artist who could not attend the fair where his work critiques the systems that kept him away, and this year did attend, standing in a fair where another gallery could not.
The art world is not a neutral space. It never has been. The question this newsletter keeps asking is whether the people who benefit from that fact are willing to change it, and whether the people excluded by it can find ways to be heard regardless.
This week in Basel, both questions are being answered simultaneously. We think you should know.