Ten Curators in support of Khaled Sabsabi: Edition 8

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.

Reuben Friend (Māori/Ngāti Maniapoto, Pākehā) is a Wellington-based Aotearoa New Zealand artist, curator and writer. Friend has curated numerous national and international art projects in Aotearoa New Zealand, Taiwan, Australia and Canada as the Director of Pātaka Art Gallery and Museum in Porirua from 2015-2021, and Curator Māori-Pacific Art at City Gallery Wellington from 2009-2013. In 2016 Friend curated a suite of solo exhibitions with Khaled Sabsabi, Abdul Abdullah and Abdul Rahman Abdullah entitled 'Dark Horizons' at Pātaka Art+Museum in Porirua, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Dark Clouds and Super Heroes: Khaled Sabsabi

Artist’s appeal to our most basic sense of humanity. Some do so by looking at the demure and mundane aspects of everyday life, some tackle the big existential questions of life and existence, and others like Khaled Sabsabi speak for the life and times of communities who have been silenced. 

In 2016 I curated a suite of solo exhibitions with Khaled Sabsabi, Abdul Abdullah and Abdul Rahman Abdullah entitled Dark Horizons at Pātaka Art+Museum in Porirua, Aotearoa New Zealand. Dark Horizons remains one of the most powerful and memorable exhibitions in my career, with the message of the project becoming more potent with the recent news of Sabsabi’s appointment to represent Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale, and even more so with that same offer being rescinded soon after it was awarded due to the socio-geopolitics of our nation’s economic and military allegiances to Western superpowers such as the United States of America. 

Dark Horizons explored the growing sense of fear and anxiety of the never-ending wars and impending environment collapse that has gripped the world in our lifetimes. Looking back on that exhibition nearly a decade later, the importance of this project and exhibitions like it are more vital than ever. Those dark horizons have well and truly made landfall, and the storm clouds are hanging over our heads.

Today, with Sabsabi’s Venice nomination being vetoed by government officials, we see the face of fascism emerging with artist’s voices and their freedom of speech being actively censored for calling attention to our nation’s role in atrocities occurring at home and overseas. 

It seems bizarre that we have to defend the right of artists like Khaled Sabsabi in communicating basic human values, even with statements as obvious as colonisation and genocide are bad.

To understand the importance of Sabsabi’s art, we need to understand the environment that created him, both prior and subsequent to his arrival in Sydney’s culturally diverse Western suburbs in the 1970s. Born in Tripoli in the years preceding the Lebanese Civil War, Sabsabi was just a child when he first witnessed the butchered bodies of soldiers and militia men piled into the back of a truck parked across the street from his grandmother’s apartment. In the months following, as the fighting approached their home, they experienced intense shelling and were eventually forced to flee through the warzone when the basement they were sheltering in came close to collapse.

Sabsabi remembers being frozen with fear when snipers shot at him, his brother and their grandmother as they crossed through areas of open terrain. Surviving this horrific ordeal, Sabsabi and his family eventually found a new home in Sydney’s culturally diverse Western suburbs. Yet this refuge in Australia has not been completely peaceful either, and through his artwork Sabsabi reflects on the struggles he has faced as a Muslim Lebanese man trying to find his place in Australia, and the desire he possessed for reconciliation with the homeland he was forced to flee.

In his Dark Horizons installation entitled We Kill You, 2016, Sabsabi spoke of the fear that Muslim and Arab peoples experience through Western colonial violence. The expansive three channel moving image installation, produced over a two-year period, documents a journey home to Lebanon and the Middle East, documenting a process of re-familiarisation that includes footage shot in Morocco and Saudi Arabia. The moving image works are projected onto two-sided projection screens – enabling the viewer to walk around to the rear side of the screen to view a mirror image of the footage. This sleight of hand, in reversing the image, is more than a symbolic gesture. It is a demonstration of how seemingly subtle shifts in perspective can distort reality and move existing customs and practices in new directions.

Sabsabi uses this device to delve into a range of themes, from Pan-Arab nationalist sentiment, increasing militarisation and the destabilising effects of colonialism. As he states, “the work is another personal chapter in dealing with and showing the factual contradictions of war and the effects, it has had on all people everywhere.”

I thought of the We Kill You installation recently when US President Donald Trump spoke of the “Riviera of the Middle East” as the future that he envisioned for Gaza, which he supplemented with a bizarre AI generated video of him and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu sipping cocktails on a beach ravaged by war. This lack of basic humanity where corporate profits are more important than children’s lives is unfathomable, but our government’s complicity in supporting the genocide is unwavering. In a world where economic growth and corporate profits are prioritised over the wellbeing of people and the preservation of our planet’s environment, the role of Sabsabi as a leader in Australian contemporary art has never been more urgent or vital in appealing to our basic sense of humanity.

The world needs superheroes, people who are brave enough to face the threats of the world and speak their truth regardless. Sabsabi is one of those heroes, and his superpower is the art he creates and the words he speaks for those whose voices have been taken away from them.