Khaled Sabsabi

Mining mysticism and spirituality to Hip Hop and street art, Western Sydney based artist Khaled Sababi’s survey show at The Lock-Up spans eighteen years of the artist's practice and recalls his early connection to Newcastle.

In 2022, dual survey shows by Khaled Sabsabi were presented, with Campbelltown Arts Centre hosting Khaled Sabsabi: A Hope and the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, staging Khaled Sabsabi: A Promise. These messages gave voice to Sabsabi from the west, where he lives, to the east of the city where he found refuge—a hope and a promise. This poetic sentiment has been explored further in his new survey exhibition spanning eighteen years at The Lock-Up (TLU), Newcastle, with the eponymous title Khaled Sabsabi.

Sabsabi’s name has been gaining momentum, with recent achievements including the Creative Australia Award for Visual Arts 2023, “acknowledging Australian artists who have made an outstanding and sustained contribution to their art form and the cultural life of the nation;” the monograph Khaled Sabsabi by Bandicoot Publishing, 2022; a major public artwork for Barangaroo, Sydney; and installation at the 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, 2024.

Represented by Milani Gallery, Sabsabi is embarking on an international residency to the American Academy in Rome, after being awarded the highly sought-after Mordant Family and Creative Australia Affiliated Fellowship. With new work in development for Powerhouse Parramatta in 2025, titled Moments in Waiting, Khaled Sabsabi is carving out a dynamic career.

Sabsabi was born in Tripoli in 1965. In the early seventies his family sought refuge in Australia, fleeing the civil war in Lebanon. As a child there was a back and forth between the two countries. Navigating dislocation, family separation, and experiencing the horrors of war has had a profound impact on the artist. According to John Clark, in the monograph Khaled Sabsabi, 2022, “His history, that of Lebanon, and of Sydney, resonate in whatever he makes.” As an adult he returned to Lebanon through an Australian Community Cultural Development Fellowship in 2001 and spent two years working in the Middle East. For this exhibition, Sabsabi draws on his personal experience, identity, politics, heritage, faith, and spirituality to create a show which encompasses his past and present.

Sabsabi is rare—when almost forty percent of Australians have no religion and the other forty percent identify as Christian—he boldly declares his Sufism (the most mystical arm of the Muslim faith) and acknowledges spirituality as a driving force in his art practice. This is the power of the encounter with his artwork: he provides a space for meditation, contemplation, and cultural insight.

In 2016 Sabsabi initiated Eleven, a collective of Muslim Australian artists, to amplify the voices of Muslim artists and challenge the hegemonic cultural discourse. The group’s members include Abdul Abdullah, Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Hoda Afshar, and Shireen Taweel, amongst others. His experience as an artist in Western Sydney, the influence of Hip Hop and street art, is also formative to his practice. His process as a DJ and music producer, layering, mixing, and scratching music is echoed in the mark-making, adding, subtracting, and rhythmic patternation he brings to his artworks.

In the main space of TLU, a video screen hangs diagonally across a floor work reminiscent of a large Persian rug. On the screen are morning prayers. Entitled Lefke Morning, 2012, the work is shot with an infrared night vision camera. Details were removed, it is blurred, becoming closer to an abstract image with shifting soft emerald greens. The room is suffused with rose scent and the sound of chanting fills the space. There is the beginning of the work 40, 2020. In this space, its arc spans the exhibition and its title introduces audiences to Sabsabi’s fascination with the symbolism of numbers. The floor work 1008, 2020, is comprised of smaller rectangular works, each one forming part of the larger whole. The images are hidden, disguising the work, closer to camouflage, like the images of war tapestried into contemporary Persian rugs. There is a push pull between a place of conflict and a place for prayer.

For the installation 40, Sabsabi was influenced by Ibn al-‘Arabī, an early mystic and philosopher. Sabsabi uses the symbolism of numbers as a narrative element, exploring the notion that there is a common quest for sense making. For example, the number forty has prevalence across religions: the prophet of Islam, Mohammed, was forty years old when the Qur’an was revealed to him; the Christian messiah, Jesus, spent forty days fasting in the desert; and many Hindu devotional prayers are made up of forty stanzas. These reverberations and connections encircle the installations.

In a video produced for the exhibition, Sabsabi states “The Lock-Up has a difficult history.” He continues with a powerful introduction to the former Police station and heritage site located on a place inhabited by First Nations peoples for 60,000 years—the space is confronting and wears its trauma directly. He challenges the viewer to lean towards healing and spiritual works.

In the far corner of TLU is the video work entitled Syria, 2011. This piece relies on the patterning of fractal geometry, created from footage the artist had recorded over several years. Reminiscent of the work Static No.12, 2009-10, by Daniel Crooks or Angelica Mesiti’s Rapture (Silent Anthem), 2009, it is a kaleidoscope with slow gentle shifts, and at first glance mimics Middle Eastern aesthetics found in mosaics and architecture. It depicts everyday imagery of street scenes and a bustling city—something hopeful and beautiful—that it is a stand in for Syria. A country gripped by war, suffering utter loss and devastation.

This show is also a kind of homecoming for Khaled Sabsabi, who visited Newcastle in his youth, engaging in the local Hip Hop scene. This connection is strengthened by a recent collaboration with Newcastle based artist Shane Kennedy AKA Tunz; their work and a video of the process is projected onto the speckled and tagged walls of The Lock-Up spaces.

This review was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 69 

EXHIBITION
Khaled Sabsabi
14 September – 24 November 2024
The Lock-Up, Newcastle