Author Archives: Artist Profile
11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art
“Well, it’s APT time . . . again,” I want to say with the on-camera inflections of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, 1993, dejected by the day’s repetition. Now in its eleventh iteration, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) conjures, in hardened Australian gallery-goers at least, a corresponding mix of disillusionment and intrigue […]
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Ten Curators in support of Khaled Sabsabi: Edition 9
Aajyna 1998 + 2022 The intangible feeling of hope and hopelessness is inexplicable. Hope can drive and inspire, while hopelessness can leave one feeling empty, devoid of belief. Hopelessness is akin to a spiritual death – the resignation that nothing holds value. As an Arab, Muslim artist living in South-West Sydney, Khaled’s practice is often […]
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Tagged Creative Australia, Khaled Sabsabi, Venice Biennale 2026
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Ten Curators in support of Khaled Sabsabi: Edition 8
Dark Clouds and Super Heroes: Khaled Sabsabi Artist’s appeal to our most basic sense of humanity. Some do so by looking at the demure and mundane aspects of everyday life, some tackle the big existential questions of life and existence, and others like Khaled Sabsabi speak for the life and times of communities who have […]
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Tagged Creative Australia, Khaled Sabsabi, Venice Biennale 2026
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Ten Curators in support of Khaled Sabsabi: Edition 7
Organised Confusion, 2014, is a multi-channel installation that continues Khaled Sabsabi’s investigation into systems of belief and spirituality, and their role in the construction of both our individual and collective identities. Two video channels projected onto opposing walls capture the football fan club “Red and Black Bloc,” united in their fervent support of the Western […]
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Tagged Creative Australia, Khaled Sabsabi, Venice Biennale 2026
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Ten Curators in support of Khaled Sabsabi: Edition 6
This text has been commissioned to articulate my feelings about the value of artist Khaled Sabsabi. I feel strongly that Khaled Sabsabi is overdue to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale. His work shows him to be a visionary who prompts us to face ourselves and search our souls. In 2011 Sabsabi was awarded, without […]
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Ten Curators in support of Khaled Sabsabi: Edition 5
Khaled Sabsabi / To hold the multiple lives of truth As an artist with a career spanning over four decades, Khaled Sabsabi has, by faith and by practice, pursued a balance of peace against chaos and the elevation of the human spirit from human hubris. Anchored by his Tasawuf Sufist practice (the mystic branch of […]
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Tagged Creative Australia, Khaled Sabsabi, Venice Biennale
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Lauren Brincat
Brincat tells me that painting came first and performance later. She initially trained in painting at Sydney College of the Arts and remembers the painting department as the only discipline at the time where you could move beyond the form. She recalls painter and lecturer Matthys Gerber making a call to arms to her cohort, […]
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Ten Curators in support of Khaled Sabsabi: Edition 4
It’s surreal. A little over two weeks ago I was invited to a lunch celebrating the announcement of Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino as the official artistic team to represent Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale, and was seated next to Khaled himself. The small restaurant was filled with Creative Australia senior officials and supporters, […]
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Tagged Creative Australia, Khaled Sabsabi, Venice Biennale
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Kirtika Kain | Sensing into the Abyss
Upon entering Kirtika Kain’s studio, I am immediately struck by the force with which her canvases command my attention. The only way I can describe her painting is volcanic: a rupture in the hegemony of the contemporary art world. Kirtika is attuned to the interiority of her materials—tar, copper, vermilion, gold leaf, earthen pigment, cow […]
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The Artful Dodger
In mid-February, Tony Burke, Minister for Home Affairs and Minister for the Arts, attended a citizenship blitz he asked his department to arrange, for migrants living in those western Sydney electorates considered to be vulnerable at the impending Federal election. It’s odd for a Minister to be so generous with his time. After all, citizenship […]
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Tagged Creative Australia, Khaled Sabsabi, Tony Burke, Venice Biennale
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Ten Curators in support of Khaled Sabsabi: Edition 3
To seek a moment of quietude amongst the storm of words we need only to return ourselves to Khaled’s work, any one of his works. I return often to the simple community space of Naqshbandi Greenacre engagement (2011) for which he was awarded the Blake Prize for Religious Art. But I’ve written about that work […]
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Tagged Creative Australia, Khaled Sabsabi, Venice Biennale
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Ten Curators in support of Khaled Sabsabi: Edition 2
Pavilion Lost Khaled Sabsabi chosen and cancelled in one week for the Australian Pavilion in Venice, 2026! How is this possible in Australia in 2025? I consider the Lebanese-Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi as one of the most significant artists working in Australia today. So, I read with disbelief of the decision taken by Creative Australia’s […]
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Tagged Creative Australia, Khaled Sabsabi, Venice Biennale 2026
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Ten Curators in support of Khaled Sabsabi: Edition 1
In full support of Khaled Sabsabi’s work Khaled Sabsabi’s artistic research stands as a powerful exploration of his Lebanese heritage and the realities of the Middle Eastern diaspora. Like many of his peers, he directly confronts the violent legacy of decades of conflict, refusing to shy away from the complexities it introduces. His research […]
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Tagged Creative Australia, Khaled Sabsabi, Venice Biennale
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Issue 69
In Artist Profile’s sixty-ninth issue there are many articles that delve into the artists’ nature, their understanding of materials, but mostly their courage to reveal the uneven.
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Grounded Mystic | Khaled Sabsabi
On an unseasonably warm afternoon, Khaled Sabsabi unveils a new mystical world housed in a humble, cramped, tin shed doubling up as his studio at Fairfield City Museum and Gallery in south-west Sydney. Beads of sweat drip off him as he strips one layer of protective fabric after the next, to reveal his latest masterpiece […]
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Sara Maher and the expression of light
Sara Maher was the first artist I met in Tasmania. I encountered Maher gently arranging tiny drawings and prints in a tree for the 2004 Mountain Festival Sculpture Trail. It was a generous work, and despite its public location, deeply personal. The illustrations stemmed from an intuitive “drawing and writing process” that Maher and her […]
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Tagged Artist Profile Magazine, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Sara Maher
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Nick Collerson
Collerson’s studio—a former SES [State Emergency Service] hall—is long and mostly windowless, spacious yet stacked with canvases. As we sit, I ask about his day and Collerson mentions he’s been translating Aristotle’s Poetics, using self-taught Ancient Greek. Ancient philosophy is a cavernous place to begin, so I segue to a drum kit and guitar in […]
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Can’t be found | Tracing lost tapestries in the public domain
How can large woven tapestries, meters high and wide, come to be lost? Weaving is a primal medium, said to have been the first building material used when humans began to make houses. While working as an illustrator in the British Museum, London, in 1969, I was astonished by ancient Coptic tapestries whose vibrant arabesques […]
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Up in the air and down on the ground Rosemary Laing, 1959-2024
“She is after all not a nature photographer but the photographer of a predicament . . .” Douglas Kahn, Photofile, 1995 I am listening to Rosemary Laing play on the Steinway piano in the Boyd family sitting room at Bundanon where she was in residence. She recorded herself playing as an accompaniment to her otherwise […]
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Brian Robinson
Brian Robinson is a multi-skilled contemporary artist whose practice combines his passion for experimentation crossing boundaries between reality and fantasy.
The Signs Are Good: 20 years of painting the future
Norton’s 20-year survey is comprehensive and greatly defined by the artist’s upbringing – born in the 1950s and growing up during the political and social upheaval of the 1970s and 1980s. The Cold War and imminent threat of nuclear war permeated the press and popular culture. In these larger-than-life experiences it is unsurprising that the […]
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Tagged Adam Norton, Artist Profile Magazine, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, The Space Race
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Portia Geach: Activist and Artist
Being famous can be a fleeting thing. Time moves on. Values change. What once held a certain status, like being crowned Miss Australia, loses its lustre; archival material becomes difficult to find; memories are lost; new narratives take over the old. This would have been the fate of artist and social activist Portia Swanston Geach […]
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Francis Bacon: Human Presence
The exhibition is an introspective examination of Bacon’s approach to the human condition. It provides an intimate view of those closest to the artist and what he described as the “cruel injury” of his depictions and twisted explorations in pursuit of an arresting visual “truth.” At a time when chaos abounds in the world, this […]
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Ann Thomson
Ann Thomson celebrated her ninetieth birthday in October 2023. Born in Queensland in 1933, the daughter of a prominent Brisbane bookseller, she was genteelly brought up but was given plenty of leeway to express her natural physical exuberance. At her school, Somerville House, all of her art teachers (Caroline Barker, Patricia Prentice, June Meek, Betty […]
