Ten Curators in support of Khaled Sabsabi: Edition 6

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.

Anne Loxley is an award-winning curator who specialises in collaborating with artists and communities to creatively address significant issues. In 2020 she joined ACE as Executive Director. Previously Loxley was Senior Curator, C3West, for Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. In 2010 Loxley award Sabsabi, The Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship presented by the New South Wales Government.

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 controversy or pause, Australia’s prestigious prize for religious art, the Blake, for Naqshbandi Greenacre Engagement, 2010. This three-channel video work documents the weekly gatherings of Naqshbandi Sufis in a Greenacre Scout Hall.  The work hardly looked exotic, as Steve Meacham wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald at the time, the subjects appear “ordinary. The men and women are wearing everyday clothes. Their children run around in the background, oblivious to the spiritual ceremony, anxious to get on with their Saturday.”

However, it was precisely this “ordinariness” which gave the work its winning edge; one of the judges, religious history academic Dr. Julian Droogan said the work talks of “religion as normal daily practice, as social community, as being held together by family and kin.”

In 2014 Sabsabi turned his focus to soccer, specifically, the Western Sydney Wanderers’ most ardent fans, the Red and Black bloc, in his two-channel video work Wonderland (awarded Campbelltown Art Centre’s Fisher’s Ghost Award in the same year). Viewers stand between two large scale screens showing the impassioned crowds, who only appear to be cheering the same side. As Mikala Tai has noted, the painfully discordant soundscape forces viewers to “move towards one side and, in essence, to pick a side. Despite their similarities their passion does not converge to be united but rather proves to be untenable.”

In 2020 for the Covid-era Kaldor Public Art Project 36, John Kaldor invited artists to write instructions for conceptual art works (for publication). In Mental Floss 777, Sabsabi asked readers to reflect on a number of quotes from the Sufi poet Rumi:

Let your teacher be love itself.
Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
When you lose all sense of self, the bonds of a thousand chains will vanish.
Silence gives answers. Let silence take you to the core of life.
Let silence be the art you practise. Close your eyes, fall in love, stay there.
What you seek is seeking you. Let the beauty we love be what we do.
You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop.

Invariably gentle and poetic, sometimes excoriating, always incisive, dignified and humble, Khaled Sabsabi is a seer. He is a man for these deeply disturbing times.