The Old Narrative is Dying, and the New Narrative Struggles to be Born

As we all come to terms with the fatality of the decision of Creative Australia to revoke the invitation of Khaled Sabsabi to represent Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale, and a disgruntled quietude descends again over our social media feeds, I am drawn to ask the question “what has changed?” Something has definitely changed. After all, the two offending artworks at the heart of this affair were, less than twenty years ago, acceptable statements of public discourse. So much so that one of them was collected by a national institution.

It’s not as though the national attitude toward acts of terrorism was more permissive in the past.  Thank you very much, 2006, in which footage of 9/11 was collated with footage of US President George W. Bush expressing gratitude and YOU (also 2006) showing the light infused face of Hezbolah leader Hassan Nasralah’s would have been far fresher in their radical confrontation of the accepted narrative of 9/11 than they could be today. Sabsabi has even been accused, in the past, of being a relatively conservative artist because of the palatability of his works to institutional value systems: what is perceived as the “conciliatory” tone his work takes toward the structures of the dominant culture.  So, what has changed?

When these early works were made, Australia was still basking (some might say labouring) in the afterglow of multiculturalism, Australia’s belated attempt to come to terms with the growing diversity of our population and works like his were seen as expressions of culturally and historically informed perspectives that diverged from the sense of national identity that descended from the 1901 White Australia policy. Multiculturalism was an experiment, and like anything that we put into the actual world, it was a mixture of good and bad but for its moment it made Australia a more tolerant country than it otherwise would have been. A tolerance that is still residual today (though precariously so). It did this by suggesting that our national unity was not necessarily to be had through the repression of our differences but through our acceptance of them.

This is less true of the Australia we live in today. The rationale given by the Creative Australia for rescinding Sabsabi’s invitation, that his selection “could undermine our goal of bringing Australians together through art and creativity” is a return to the suppression of these differences as a means of imposing unity. You can sense this imperative in the emptiness of the phrase “bringing Australians together through art and creativity.” What does that even mean if you won’t allow Australians to express the differences that are inconvenient to the unity you are trying to generate?  What kind of social unity are you creating if it requires telling the people you don’t agree with to shut up?

It is important to remember that this decision was very much a part of its political moment. It was shocking to see a national cultural policy decision made by Tasmanian Liberal Senator and Shadow Minister for Science and the Arts, Claire Chandler through the asking of a slightly embarrassing question in the Senate. In an article tellingly titled “Under the facade of ‘diversity’ lies the real problem in Australian arts Christopher Allen rightly points out that behind this scandal burns the remains of Gaza. The decision of Creative Australia was to some degree compelled by the struggle for the narrative that will define this moment as the justified defensive violence of Israel or an overt act of genocide. Allen participates in this struggle more than reflects on it but offers a useful summation of the fascinatingly lopsided argument that is more generally at play. On one side, Allen makes the polemical claim that Sabsabi’s works are unequivocal statements in support of terrorism. On the other side is the argument that the works are ambivalent or ambiguous. The argument is not between one side saying that a terrorist is bad and the other saying that it is good. It is that one side is stating that a terrorist is bad and then accusing the other of saying that the terrorist is good. The other side replies that the work is ambiguous. It neither defends nor incriminates itself. This leaves the first side to either demand the artwork say what it means, a trap Allen is too practiced to fall into, or to declare that it means what he says it means (a trap that is often irresistible to an art critic).

This is why Sabsabi’s works are good art. They do not confront directly the dominant narrative in western society but elide the argument in ambiguous statement. The challenge they make is not through the direct contradiction of the “facts” or “truths” of this narrative, but to disturb the unambiguous certainty of its truth. This ambiguity is no longer permissible because the dominant narrative around terrorism, Israel and Palestine, a narrative that has enjoyed relative hegemony for over seventy years, is struggling to withstand the onslaught of evidence that is coming out of the Middle East. The hysterical tone of much of Allen’s argument, such as his claim that university students chanting “from the river to the sea” are calls for genocide.  Yes, that is one reading of it, but there are other readings of this slogan and thus the meaning is ambivalent. That these chants are made in protest to a completely unmentioned occurring genocide, is evidence that Allen is not above employing ambiguity himself: at least in the service of communicating absolute truth.

Is this not exactly the threat that Sabsabi poses  ̶  not that he offers the direct contradiction of an explicit argument but that he implies that there is more than one story that can be told about these events. If this argument succeeds, it undermines the blind certainty, the unambiguous simplicity of the dominant narrative at a moment when that narrative is particularly vulnerable. To do so though requires that the work leave the safety and isolation of the art world and encounters what Allen called “the world of daylight and common sense,” a world in which politicians and media magnates will discard all nuance and ambiguity and assign an undeniable polemical meaning to it for cheap political gain. Such moments are devastating for an artist: their work is made to say things they had no intention of saying and against which the artist can only reply, it’s ambiguous. 

And yet, in a way, is this not the very moment toward which most art is intended?  The moment at which the difference between its perception of the world and the world’s perception of itself comes into contradiction through the challenge that the artist makes.  The board of Creative Australia do not believe that art can withstand such a collision and must be protected from its own foolish desire to affect the world. We will never know what would have happened if Creative Australia showed a little backbone and performed its “arm’s length” duty, resisting the political interference sparked by a politician asking a question in the federal parliament. Perhaps it would have blown up into a “long and divisive debate” and perhaps it would have blown over after a news cycle or two. There’s no telling now, that possibility was taken out of the equation by the pre-emptive capitulation of the board.

At the time it made me think that the Creative Australia board functioned perfectly as a crumple bar, a structure designed to collapse and absorb the damage of a collision to protect the passenger. Whether the artist or the government is the passenger in this metaphor is an interesting question. If it is the government then we know that the myth of arm’s length funding is now completely dead.  If it is the artist, then we can resign ourselves to making art within the risk matrix of a sheltered workshop, in which we will be paternalistically protected from taking any actual risks with the work we make. Either way, we see the constriction of the public space through which our society can admit to the diversity of its constitution, to the different, at times conflicting perspectives that make up who we are as a people. As the dominant narrative hardens into an untenable ideal, it does not become stronger, it becomes more brittle, intolerant and at the same time unconvincing. It loses contact with the complex reality it is meant to reflect and reveals itself as a “story” that looks nothing like the truth. This is what has changed, and is still changing, and this is what makes Sabsabi’s ambiguity so dangerous.  

Actual unity can be achieved by people who respect and find allowances for each other’s differences, and this is what is at the heart of Sabsabi’s practice. The ambiguity that Sabsabi threads with such sympathetic grace through all his works is the suggestion that there is more than one story, more than one perspective, and that this ambivalence allows us to coexist, like two bodies occupying the same space at the same time, without each requiring the nonexistence of the other. Sabsabi has built a sustained practice of redeeming the image of Muslim and Arab Australians from the threatening stereotypes of dominant media. He has consistently and tirelessly worked to communicate the everyday humanity, compassion, and spiritual community of people who are denied this representation under the constant onslaught of their demonisation in western media. This is why Sabsabi should represent Australia at Venice.