Grounded Mystic | Khaled Sabsabi

Khaled Sabsabi is an award-winning Lebanese Australian artist. In September he was awarded by his peers the inaugural Creative Australia Award for Visual Arts. His latest works Knowing Beyond and Buraq unfurl the spiritual dynamics steeped in Sufi cosmology which inform his aesthetic creations.

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 Knowing Beyond.

He is scheduled to exhibit Knowing Beyond at the 18th edition of the Adelaide Biennial: Inner Sanctum. The Biennial is curated by José Da Silva, and will be showing in March of 2024.

Sabsabi’s artistic process is slow, the labour is grinding, the craft is measured. Sabsabi likes it this way. It matches his speech and his thought process in its expansiveness, its long drawn-out stretches of punctuated silences. Ultimately, at its heart, he is observing and listening.

Sabsabi’s most recent accolade came in September 2023 when he received the inaugural Creative Australia Award for Visual Arts. Kudos and plaudits can come and go, yet the work remains steady, evolving, palimpsestic.

Represented by Milani Gallery in Brisbane; his work has featured at the Marrakech and Shanghai Biennales, the Sharjah Biennial and numerous other galleries from Argentina to Germany and Malaysia.

He has also had shows at the Art Gallery of NSW, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts and Campbelltown Arts Centre among others.

At every turn, there’s tinkering owing to his background as a Hip Hop DJ in the 1980s, when Hip Hop was still a nascent music genre in Australia, before moving to being multimedia artist and curator, excelling at the use of video.

The DJ techniques of organic mixing and scratching records is foundational to his art-making.

Using material in front of him—whether it is an arcane laptop that’s about to give out, or scraps of paper shoddily strewn around to map out his artwork on a miniature scale before expanding it—Sabsabi is at home in his philological imagination.

For Knowing Beyond, he expertly uses three different blends and consistencies of pulverised coffee drunk around the Arab world. East Africa and the Mediterranean, dark Arabic, red Turkish and light Greek, to drown one side of his canvases into indecipherable figures. He is making a not-so-subtle reference to “the contact zones” of empires, introduced by Mary Louise Pratt in 1991.

“The reason for coffee is because of the spice wars led to slave trade, colonisation which led to everything that is bad and good about humanity,” Sabsabi explains. He then seamlessly rattles off a list of its alluring poetic qualities.

“It is associated with fortune-telling, story-telling, fact, fiction, faith, displacement and memory.”

He then ruminates on “the residue of memory” and how it carries oral histories, unexcavated granules at the bottom of the cup, sedimented in cratered geographies of the past and the future.

Sabsabi’s off-the-cuff meditations reminded me of my cousin Alan Mikhail’s work on Ottoman coffeehouses and my many years sitting in Cairo’s cafes drinking, gossiping and smoking shisha heavily.

He writes “symbolising the burning pain of unrequited love, carbonization and burning (of coffee) also had an air of illegality attached to them.”

Sabsabi is experimenting on his canvases with the different gradations of roasts, seeking to express his subversive political energy.

The faceless figures “could be anyone, could be you, could be me,” but he finally admits “they’re actually Australian politicians recent and past” that he was thinking of when he was creating. When I prod him why, he cheekily shoots back “maybe I want to put spells on them.”

“It’s the act of hope, act of fortune, act of despair. Despair because we need change, something’s got to give,” he adds.

Sabsabi was born in Lebanon in 1965 and came to Australia in 1976 with his family to escape the civil war that tore the country apart. “We’re the bastards of bastards essentially . . . we’ve come from another place due to circumstances out of our control,” he explains.

The spells he is referring to draw on an unearthed gnostic tradition of mystical Sufism.

In the thirteenth century, Algerian scholar Ahmed al-Buni wrote a controversial, esoteric manual called Shams al-Ma’arif (The Sun of Knowledge). This grimoire, or book of magic and spells, dabbled in the underworld of jinn and angels, numbers and patterns. Talismanic in nature, totemic in taboo, it spawned a new language to its believers to achieve an ecstatic plane of spiritual enlightenment.

The occultic treatise quickly gained notoriety as a philosophical tome focussed on unlocking Islamic divinities, but it was also lambasted as dangerous devil-worship and banned across the Muslim world.

In Knowing Beyond, Sabsabi is deliberately rescuing this blasphemous taboo chapter with his own contemporary out-of-body experience.

On other canvases that form the work, he is playing with Arabic numbers and letters to create compendiums of a new profane vocabulary, arranged to look like sacred electrical circuits or puzzles. There are eight pieces of fabric measuring 2 x 1.7 metres and two smaller pieces that are 1.7 x 1.5 metres. All these specific numbers and measurements draw on Sufi numerology, that seem familiar, but embedded within them are the depths of his abstract artistic process at work.

“The idea is looking at possibilities that we don’t understand and opening these pathways to have discussion, rather than dismiss scholarship and scholars and say no, that’s taboo don’t go there. We should complete ourselves and open ourselves, because we might find things that make us a better race or society.”

Sabsabi’s hidden messages and secret linguistic labyrinths lead to the number forty which is significant in Abrahamic traditions (think forty days and nights in the desert, mourning someone’s death for forty days), but also evokes maturity or an infinite state of being in Tasawwuf (Sufism).

He is casually dropping knowledge on his audience, a Hip Hop oracle.

Knowing Beyond brings to mind his previous work entitled 40 which he displayed in 2021. It is not by accident. It is completely by design.

“The way I make these is I do my research, I look at it and understand from my logic,” Sabsabi explains. “This is research that has taken me twenty years. Then I do these patterns in Photoshop on my desktop, then I project, then I start to compose it, then I get to places where I start to go with the flow.”

That flow is undergirded by an arithmetical exactitude, and intentional methodological jazz-like freedom that connects a grounded physicality with a luminous spirituality.

Continuing his dream-like journey, Sabsabi then shows me another work Buraq, which he is excited to exhibit in Jakarta in November. Again, it is a work that revealed itself nearly a decade after his first trip to Indonesia in 2014, finalised this year. Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation and Australia’s neighbour.

Sabsabi is a master of collapsing time and space, blending and budding new artistic forms, springing forth unique paeans based on lyrical connections. Buraq is precisely that.

He recounts that when he visited Pacitan Regency in East Java Province he was entranced by the zikr, a devotional Sufi chant, performed in hushed, lilting tones by the villagers one night. He then witnessed a high-energy, cathartic East Javanese dance a couple of days after where women don intricate costumes, makeup, horse effigies and jump around, ceaselessly summoning the spirits of their ancestors. That magical dance, the possessed-horse dance as he later found out, is transposed in the background of Buraq skilfully as the zikr is performed to contrast the different speeds and rhythms of both performances, to show that both can co-exist.

And then suddenly in this repetitive, obsessive looping of frames and forms, audio and video, light and dark, the name for this mystical work revealed itself as an apparition to him. Buraq is a mythical, winged white horse with a human face in Islamic lore that transported the Prophet Muhammed (Peace be upon him) from Mecca to Jerusalem and the highest heavens all in one night. The brilliant beast’s name is derived from the word “barq,” in Arabic meaning lightning, hence lightning speed.
Building on centuries of Islamic visual art where the creature is depicted in Persian and South Asian miniature art from the fifteenth century, Sabsabi is stretching this lineage from paper to the screen.

“In the west there’s a misguided misconception that Islamic art is dead. We’re only interested in the objects of the past. This is the contemporary version of the same craft,” he divulges.

Sabsabi is flinging his audience on a heavenly odyssey, soaring galactically with them through a range of emotions. The chaotic, dissonant movements of the dancers are juxtaposed with the stillness of the Sufi singers to elicit multiple spiritualities, ones that are at once devoutly ritualistic and rebellious.

The same can be said of Sabsabi and his artistic praxis. He is a student of the heterogenous forms he flirts with, but he is also an aporetic narrative teller. A mystic grounded in his phenomenological experiences.

EXHIBITION
18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Inner Sanctum
1 March – 2 June 2024
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Knowing Beyond
18 November 2023 – 14 April 2024
Museum MACAN, Jakarta, Indonesia

This profile was published in Artist Profile, Issue 65, 2023
Images courtesy of the artist, Artspace, Sydney, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, NSW, Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW, Carriageworks, Sydney, Miliani Gallery, Brisbane