Ten Curators in support of Khaled Sabsabi: Edition 5

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.

Alexandra Pedley is Director of The Lock-Up in Newcastle, New South Wales. In late 2024 Pedley with the former director Warwick Heywood curated many of Sabsabi’s works with Lefke Morning, 2012-18 and his collaboration with Newcastle based artist Shane Kennedy AKA TUNZ.

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 Islam), he references his personal and cultural heritage in image and gesture to develop a sophisticated language, a presence the artist calls the “voice,” in his video works, paintings, and installations. Transcending ideological divisions, Sabsabi’s works communicate and connect diverse human experiences of war, faith, community and hope.

One poignant example arises in Lefke Morning, 2012-18. Sabsabi travelled to Cyprus spending time with the exiled Naqshbandi-Haqqani order, meeting with Sufi Sheikh Nazim Al-Haqqani and securing there the footage for the film. A purposefully out-of-focus predawn scene, colour graded in green; we hear chanting in Arabic. Momentarily and delicately, it plays with the expectations cued by “night vision” film, of military “anti-terror” ops footage, customary on global Western news of the decade preceding 2012 when work on the film was begun. The soundscape, a gradual and rhythmic building of chanting reveals, however, a scene of peace, of Sufist prayer. In the low-lit gallery, the blurred film invites us to bypass the reliance on image economies, asking viewers instead to turn within, to listen.

Most recently shown at The Lock-Up, the powerful meditative Lefke Morning represented the ritual heart of the exhibition experience and took on greater vulnerability considering the Gaza War and its incursions into surrounding territories including the artist’s childhood home of Lebanon. The film is accompanied by two acrylic paintings, with abstracted Arabic script in burnt yellows and umbers, lit as candles or small fires might be in a sacral space — it was visceral and of the order of spiritual contemplation.

Many of Sabsabi’s works require this in-person encounter. They are not made for sound bites, social media or parliamentary floor contortions. Historically, art and its physical and social architectures have been inseparable. That governments can dislocate the embodied experience of being with art, to not allow questions of ourselves, or publics their right of response, or that of an artist’s — art requiring all of these to attempt its impossible task of self-completion — is a troubling sign of the times. Though nothing new for artists. For Khaled Sabsabi, Lefke Morning sits on a continuum and career of questioning of self, of the relentless return to human violence, of reaching towards the divine, of seeking balance in the chaos.

If, in Sabsabi’s practice, it suffices for the act of questioning to be the problem, art more broadly then poses an immediate and irreconcilable threat, where the role of all art and artists has always been to question. For Sabsabi, his role through his work, is to offer space for and to hold the multiple lives of truth. His work and the creation of a place for its encounter is now as important as it has ever been.

Artwork: Khaled Sabsabi, Lefke Morning, 2012-18, single-channel HD video (projection), audio, 17:58 minutes infinite loop, variable sizes, acrylic, oil paint and stick, MDF board, 60 x 52 cm and 60 x 90 cm, framed installation.