Tudor Rhys Etchells (b.1994 Cardiff, Wales)
is a documentary artist who uses the fiction of the photograph to challenge legally created realities.

Working within such a bureaucracy in his previous role as a human rights lawyer inspires his closeness to the document and brutally mundane. To him, the photograph and the law are both frameworks for negotiating evidence, belief and knowledge.

The performative element of these systems is best acted on the stage photography provides. By breaking the fourth wall, legal and photographic portrayals of truth can be subverted.

Documentary is a medium that often fails, so satirising its relationship to border regimes, the norm of the imagined nation state is questioned. 


tudoretchells@gmail.com
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The sale of citizenship is more commonly known as Golden Passports, or Citizenship-By-Investment. Estate agents sell newly developed apartments that because of their price, allow the buyer to obtain the passport of that country. To understand how this institutionalised mobility is enacted Tudor Rhys Etchells undertook a durational performance of such a purchase. Posing as a wealthy investor he toured projects that would soon (not) house new citizens or their tenants. 

Within those viewings, model flats exhibited as homes whilst the agent and client believed to care about the quality of the finish. Reality was suspended for the duration of the negotiation. Citizenship itself acting only as a means of unfettered access to a third country otherwise not granted by the original passport. This disconnect from the nation emulates the arbitrariness of citizenship when it is tied to material form as capital. Citizenship becomes a luxury good. New builds become an outlier as citizenship is usually unseen, its emptiness manifested in the failed utopia of gentrified concrete interiors.

The speed of the construction process mimics the seamless path to citizenship only accessible to the super-rich. Within global financial capitalism, tax-avoiding oligarchs create incentives for these schemes to exist, their influence on the law permits their criminality to be ignored. The tragedy of the wealth divide plays out in encounters where character’s roles are uncertain. When the camera is handled by the estate agent, the investor must keep a straight face. 

In Available Potential Guaranteed architectural, legal and photographic protocols are bypassed through trust and subterfuge. By mocking the authority of the documentary, the systems of power that provide its facade as a superior way of knowing are revealed.

When borders perform their apparent factualness a response that doubts their legitimacy is required. Where best to interrogate the ethics of performance than in the photograph.

Responding to the work through understanding how the idea of shelter and sanctuary are treated as privileged value exchange in the West, writer Sadia Pineda Hameed returns us to the very real conditions in which this scheme exists with the piece, condition space.



Last Updated 08.06.2026






Installation views - 
Work In Progress - BayArt 2024