Borders, Bodies, Passports: Performance Art and the Politics of Migration
In 2002, the Serbian-born artist Tanja Ostojić placed a personal ad in a European newspaper. She was looking for a husband — specifically, a man with European Union citizenship. The work, titled Looking for a Husband with EU Passport, was not a prank or a provocation for its own sake. It was an act of radical transparency about the bureaucratic violence that migration regimes inflict on bodies, desires, and intimate life. Ostojić did marry a man who responded. The marriage lasted the requisite period for her to obtain residency. Then they divorced. The entire process — courtship, ceremony, cohabitation, dissolution — was documented as art.
What Ostojić made visible was already known to millions: that borders are not merely lines on maps but regimes of permission and prohibition that reach into the most private corners of human existence. The passport, that slim booklet of identity, determines who may move freely and who may not, who is welcomed at customs and who is detained, who may work and who must hide. For artists working at the intersection of performance and politics, the passport has become a central symbol — not of national identity in any patriotic sense, but of the global order of differential mobility.
The Body at the Border
Performance art has a particular capacity to address migration because it foregrounds the body. Painting can represent the migrant; film can document the journey; literature can narrate the interior life of displacement. But performance insists on the physical presence of a body in space, subject to the same forces — gravity, fatigue, exposure, the gaze of others — that act upon bodies in transit. When a performance artist places their own body at a border, in a detention center, or in the bureaucratic queue of an immigration office, the distinction between art and life becomes productively unstable.
This instability is not a formal game. It is an ethical stance. The performance artist who subjects their body to the conditions of migration — even temporarily, even with the safety net of an institutional framework — is making a claim about what art can and should do: not merely represent suffering at a comfortable distance, but enter into proximity with it, however imperfectly.
Tania Bruguera, the Cuban-born artist who has spent decades working between Havana and New York, has perhaps gone further than anyone in collapsing the distance between art and political action on migration. Her long-term project Immigrant Movement International, launched in 2011 in the Corona neighborhood of Queens, New York, operated as a community center for undocumented immigrants. It offered English classes, legal consultations, and cultural programming. Bruguera insisted it was art — “arte útil,” useful art — but it functioned, for its participants, as a lifeline. The question of whether it was “really” art or “really” social work was, for Bruguera, precisely the wrong question. The point was that the categories themselves were complicit in maintaining a division between aesthetic experience and political reality.
Passport as Medium
The passport has appeared in contemporary art with increasing frequency since the 1990s, a period that saw both the consolidation of the European Union’s borderless Schengen zone and the simultaneous hardening of Europe’s external borders. The contrast was not lost on artists. The same continent that celebrated the free movement of its citizens was building an ever more elaborate apparatus to exclude those from outside — the “Fortress Europe” that would become a recurring motif in political art.
In the visual economy of border regimes, the passport functions as a technology of sorting. It assigns bodies to categories: citizen, resident, visitor, asylum seeker, illegal. Each category comes with a set of permissions and prohibitions, a gradient of humanity. The artist who takes the passport as medium is not simply commenting on immigration policy; they are interrogating the fundamental logic of the nation-state’s claim to determine who belongs and who does not.
Ostojić’s work is exemplary in this regard. By literalizing the transactional nature of citizenship — marriage as a means to a passport — she exposed what is normally kept hidden behind the rhetoric of belonging, integration, and shared values. The European project, her work suggested, was not primarily about values at all. It was about access. And access was distributed according to an accident of birth.
Performance and the Bureaucratic Imaginary
One of the less examined aspects of migration art is its engagement with bureaucracy. The experience of migration, for most people, is not primarily an experience of dramatic border crossings or dangerous sea passages — though it can be those things too. It is an experience of waiting: in offices, in queues, in detention centers, in the limbo of pending applications. It is an experience of forms, documents, stamps, interviews, and the arbitrary power of functionaries who may grant or deny a life’s trajectory with the stroke of a pen.
Performance art has engaged with this bureaucratic dimension in ways that other media cannot easily replicate. The durational quality of much performance — works that last hours, days, or even years — mirrors the temporality of migration itself: the endless waiting, the repetition, the suspension between a past that is no longer accessible and a future that may never arrive. Tehching Hsieh’s year-long performances in New York in the 1980s, while not explicitly about migration, were created by an artist who was himself an undocumented immigrant from Taiwan. His One Year Performance 1981–1982 (Outdoor Piece), in which he lived outside for an entire year without entering any building, resonates unavoidably with the experience of those who live without shelter, without papers, without the legal right to be anywhere at all.
More recently, artists have turned to the specific aesthetics of bureaucratic documentation. The application form, the identity photograph, the biometric scan — these are the visual materials of the border regime, and they have been appropriated, subverted, and defamiliarized by artists seeking to make visible the violence embedded in administrative procedure. The bland neutrality of the passport photograph, for instance, with its requirements for a plain background, a neutral expression, and a direct gaze, is itself a form of disciplinary power: it demands that the subject present themselves as a standardized, legible unit of identity, stripped of context, affect, and particularity.
Beyond Representation
The challenge for performance art addressing migration is to avoid the trap of mere representation — of producing images of suffering for the consumption of those who are safely distant from it. The history of art is littered with well-intentioned works that, in their eagerness to bear witness, end up reproducing the very dynamics they claim to critique: the migrant as object of pity, the artist as heroic intermediary, the audience as enlightened witness.
The most compelling work in this field has found ways to short-circuit this economy of representation. Bruguera does it by refusing the distinction between art and service. Ostojić does it by implicating her own body and life in the system she critiques. Other artists have done it by ceding authorship to migrants themselves, by creating platforms and structures rather than finished works, by operating in spaces — community centers, legal clinics, border zones — where the audience is not the art world but the people directly affected by border regimes.
At the 2012 gathering in Graz dedicated to the proposition that “truth is concrete,” several participants addressed exactly this question: how to move from representing political realities to intervening in them. The tension between aesthetic autonomy and political utility — between art as a space of reflection and art as a tool for change — was not resolved there, nor could it be. But the gathering made clear that this tension is productive rather than paralyzing, and that the most vital art of our moment is being made precisely in the space between these poles.
The borders that performance art addresses are not only geographical. They are also the borders between art and life, between aesthetics and politics, between the symbolic and the real. In crossing these borders — sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively — performance artists working on migration remind us that all borders are constructions: necessary, perhaps, but never natural, never innocent, and always open to contestation.
