Tom Muller 'World Passport' 2000 - present
mixed media, dimensions variable

Political, cartographic and bureaucratic systems are all put under Mùller's artistic microscope, in artworks that sit in a space between artifice and reality. His ongoing World Passport project consists of seamlessly rendered passports with a difference, they are for a borderless globe. Visit the website, and you can receive your very own issued passport, with a stamped nationality of 'global citizen.' Since it's inception in 1999, the passport has evolved to include six languages, and now has holders from the Ukraine to Morocco. 

When exhibited, Tom issues transactions with a gallery-turned-embassy, complete with attendants. This hyperreal blend has generated a stream of intrigue from global punters that have responded to his project, sold on the utopic vision. 'I just sold a passport last week to a guy from Columbia, who came across the passport on the Internet,' he explains. The intriguing thing is that even Tom isn't entirely sure who is logging on and buying into the project, or for what reasons.' Because the procedure takes place over the web there isn't much of a dialogue between the applicant and myself. So I'm never completely sure whether people are aware of the so called real message behind the project, or even if they see it as art,' he says, before adding, 'But hey, people have a free choice to interpret it any way they wish.' The ultimate irony for the artist, as well as being somewhat a compliment, was the interest his passports generated from the Feds in 2001. Having posted his artworks home to Australia after exhibition in Milan, Tom was placed under suspicion by the Australian Federal Police, and monitored for twelve succeeding months. 'I had no idea that I was under surveillance until they took me in to be interrogated and searched my house. It was pretty full-on. It took me quite a while to explain to them that it was actually art, and not forgery,' he explains.

from Tom Mùller, Nyanda Smith, Cause Celebre Magazine, 2002