Ten Curators in support of Khaled Sabsabi: Edition 2

Artist Profile will be publishing ten pieces of text from international and local curators as a series of editions. These distinguished curators provided their words voluntarily in support of Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino after Creative Australia “honoured Khaled and dishonoured him” (Simryn Gill, 7.30 Report) in less than a week of announcing Sabsabi and Dagostino as the 2026 Venice Biennale team to represent Australia.

The call for the reinstatement of Sabsabi and Dagostino has been loud and strong from within the visual arts community here and abroad. The curators in support of Sabsabi have previously written on and curated his artwork.

Catherine de Zegher is a Belgian curator, a modern and contemporary art historian. In 2012 de Zegher was co-artistic director with Gerald McMaster of the Biennale of Sydney where they invited Sabsabi to contribute three works. ~ Kon Gouriotis, Editor

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 board. From 2011-2012, I worked with Khaled when I co-curated the 18^th Sydney Biennale, visiting him several times at his home and studio and talking with him at length while making the selection of his video works. I found him to be generous, kind and compassionate, with an enquiring mind and deeply thoughtful. His conversation had a quality of quiet consideration, passionate engagement certainly, but subtle and open to different understandings.

The works that I saw then, and in fact his work since, seemed to correspond with the ideas of the French philosopher Bruno Latour, in particular “compositionism”—the putting together of diverse elements in which both their relation and their heterogeneity are retained. The qualities I found in Sabsabi’s conversation were reflected in his work in ways that were both complex and engaging, thought provoking and affecting. I felt then as I do now, that here was a deeply ethical work happening—the work of a generous mind.

I selected three of Sabsabi’s videos, Airland, 2012, Biripi, 2006, and nonabel, 2011, yet there could easily have been more. If modernism can be said to have banked on grand narratives, Sabsabi’s compositionism is about considering diverse stories and aiming at recomposing what is scattered and separated; at recovering a harmony between micro and macrocosm—at least a grasp at the connection between the fates of these spheres, together with a search for the common, for shared being.

It is often fascinating to see how philosophical and sociological thinking parallels the work of artists who, mostly unaware of the discourse of philosophy—as the philosophers are of art—both anticipate and materialise a currency of collective thinking. From an exploration of the larger world, of politics, news, the generalities of social being, to the consideration of the shared place of the everyday, his artificially-coloured video Airland, juxtaposing broad inflight views of Australia with exteriors of cheap yet toxic (asbestos-containing) suburban housing built in the 1950s, escapes clumsy interpretation. In it the intimate feeds in turn into the global, but its meanings go beyond this in the engagement of the audience: it asks, as does all his work, how we can be part of art and consequential change, how we can think together, how we can put together, how we can together compose.

Installed near the Prison Precinct on Cockatoo Island, in the old sandstone Free Overseers Cottage, the video Biripi could be seen to serve almost as an antidote to the harm that was done over time, in particular to Aboriginal prisoners. Shot in the Hastings area on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales, Biripi was made by Sabsabi at the invitation of and with the Biripi people. The video’s content, covering their dance ceremonies in vibrant orange and yellow ochres, is the artist’s personal declaration of cultural appreciation and spiritual respect for both the Biripi Nation and for the traditional and rightful owners of this land. About the source of his inspiration, he told me:

It came about through my encounter with Auntie and Elder Louise Davis during a residency period. We spoke about the importance of taking a stand for a cause and the individuals’ responsibility for undertaking this task. For the inclusion in the Biennale of Sydney, I travelled back in mid-2011 to the Hastings area to get permission to present the work publicly. There I met with a member of the Purfleet Taree Local Aboriginal Land Council and a member of the Biripi dancers who are featured in the video and permission was granted by both of them. I will also speak with the traditional owners of Cockatoo Island, Sydney, to seek their acknowledgment to show the work on their land in 2012.

What is striking about this is the layering of relations through time.

In Sabsabi’s video nonabel, so movingly expressive of loss and hope, young boys stare into a dark water surface, which intermingles on the filmic surface with Arabic calligraphy: “If you destroy the image of violence, it will disappear.” Made from 784 individual still images and layered video footage, the work uses the still image as a structured reasoning, the visual and dramatic collecting of elements. There is an ordering within the chaos of impressions of certainties, propaganda, of fixed and cruel determination, to come to other meanings. Sabsabi’s process is fluent and open-ended. The video is constructed from footage of a multiplicity of symbolic subjects, moving from their original meanings towards uncertainties, as though a life journey through a threatening world. Living between Lebanon and Australia, Sabsabi closely followed the Arab Spring, a revolutionary wave of civic resistance in the Arab world with protests in sustained campaigns involving strikes, demonstrations, marches and rallies, in which social media was used to organize, communicate, and raise awareness in the face of state attempts at repression and censorship.

Sabsabi’s linking of aesthetics to ethics is an artistic process of caring and healing. Through, and in, empathic affinity, one withdraws from oneself and allows attention for the other. How is it possible to exclude such a gentle and intelligent man from the Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennale? While art is complex, speaking within the personal and the social world, and there are diverse views and understandings, the silencing of a voice speaking with compassion does not protect our democracy, it tells of a world of separation and confusion governed by fear. This erasure is done in the name of democracy, the base of which is increasingly being eroded from within by more bullies ruling the world, in a society fractured and out of balance. 

Artwork: Khaled Sabsabi, Airland, 2011, eight-channel HD video, audio, four-minutes, variable size (installation detail), courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Australia. Courtesy of the artist