Are We Free to Move About the World: The Passport in Contemporary Art
Our world is one of borders. To move through them, we must possess a singular object: the passport. Since becoming international law in 1920, the passport has emerged as a precious and simultaneously contentious document of our time. Passports are not neutral. Ranked from most powerful to least, they signal citizenship, define one’s belonging or exclusion, shape our freedom to move about the world, and tell stories of who we are via their seals, stamps, and pages.
In Are We Free to Move About the World, fifteen global contemporary artists engage with the passport as a sustained object of inquiry—as archive, symbol, abstraction, instrument of mobility, tool of surveillance, and more. Born in Algeria, Belize, Canada, Egypt, Guyana, Iran, Jamaica, Nigeria, Philippines, St. Vincent and Grenadines, South Korea, United Kingdom, and the United States, this gathering of global voices examines the great paradox of the passport—its ability to grant freedom of movement as well as curtail it.
In their work, the artists render the passport both valuable and stripped of its meaning, unpack it in context of our current migration crisis, consider the plight of the passport-less, interrogate its limitations on the rights of women, illustrate how it both casts and miscasts us, investigate its language, indict its transactional nature to be bought and sold, redefine it as a tool of dissent, and trace its emotional cartography.
The exhibition’s title, Are We Free to Move About the World, leaves out the question mark. It is both a vulnerable statement and a speculative question—an invitation to ponder a world ordered by the passport and how we negotiate our place in it.
Museum of Fine Arts Florida State University Tallahassee, Florida February 2, 2023–May 20, 2023
