Visa Denial Leaves an Empty Booth at Africa Basel — and a Larger Question About Access
An empty stand at Africa Basel has become one of the fair’s most pointed statements. Umoja Art Gallery of Uganda says its participation was derailed after Swiss visas were denied to its team, leaving the booth unstaffed even as the gallery’s works were still en route to Basel.
According to John Hillary Balyejusa, the gallery and a colleague spent roughly two months navigating the application process through the Swiss embassy in Nairobi, since Uganda does not have a Swiss embassy in Kampala. Less than a week before travel, they received a rejection letter. Balyejusa said the response was vague and especially frustrating after a year of preparation and significant financial outlay.
The gallery’s planned presentation included work by Makano, the Congo-born, Uganda-based artist. At the time of writing, those works were still being shipped to Basel, and the gallery had arranged for someone else to oversee the booth in their absence.
A sign posted at the empty booth frames the absence in broader terms, calling it a reminder that physical borders and administrative barriers still determine whose voices can be present in the art world, despite its global ambitions.
The situation resonates with Richard Mudariki’s Art World Passport, which he is showing in Basel in two locations: at Africa Basel, which focuses on galleries specializing in art from Africa and its diaspora, and at a dedicated “art world embassy” at Gerbergasse 82. The project, launched at 1:54 art fair in New York in 2024, offers a passport-like booklet that visitors can fill with doodles, notes, and photographs from art events around the world. Buyers can also purchase stamps granting access to fairs and museums in the city this week.
Mudariki has lived the issue firsthand. He was unable to travel to Basel last year after being denied a visa, and presented the project remotely by video link. This year, he is in the city after traveling through France, but he says the episode involving Umoja Art Gallery underscores the same structural problem: artists and galleries from the Global South often face extra hurdles simply to show up.
For Mudariki, the project is not only symbolic. It is also a way to ask who sets the rules of movement, why those rules fall unevenly, and whether they can be challenged. He has said he hopes to eventually gather passports from project holders into an installation that would reveal patterns of travel, exhibition, and attention over a five-year period — a record, in his words, of the times we are living through.
