Khaled Sabsabi’s Biennale stance

Khaled Sabsabi spent February 2025 being chosen for Australia’s pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, dropped six days later, and then reinstated in July after an independent review found failures in Creative Australia’s process. By April 2026, he was talking less about the fight and more about making work that refuses the speed of political outrage. (creative.gov.au) (abc.net.au) (smh.com.au) The Venice Biennale is the giant national showcase in Venice where countries get their own pavilions, so “representing Australia” works less like a normal solo show and more like being picked for a cultural national team. Australia’s official entry for the 61st International Art Exhibition opens in 2026 at the Australia Pavilion. (labiennale.org) (creative.gov.au) Sabsabi is a Lebanese-born Australian artist born in 1965 who has lived in Western Sydney for decades and worked across video, installation, sound, and painting since the late 1980s. His art has repeatedly returned to migration, faith, memory, and the way public images can flatten Muslim and Arab lives into slogans. (khaledsabsabi.com) (creative.gov.au) Creative Australia announced on February 7, 2025 that Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino would make the Australia Pavilion project together. The agency said their exhibition aimed to build empathy and connection, which sounded straightforward until older works by Sabsabi were pulled into a national political argument. (creative.gov.au) (artnews.com) The flashpoint was not a new Biennale work but past material, including a 2007 video that included Hassan Nasrallah and a 2006 image of the September 11 attacks. Critics treated those works as endorsements, while defenders said Sabsabi’s practice has long examined how charged images circulate rather than cheering for the people inside them. (artnews.com) (abc.net.au) Creative Australia then reversed course on February 13, 2025 and removed Sabsabi and Dagostino, and Senate questioning later showed Sabsabi had not been given a chance to respond before the board acted. What should have been a commissioning process turned into a governance scandal about whether an arts body could defend the artist it had just selected. (abc.net.au) (theartnewspaper.com) (theconversation.com) The backlash inside the art world was immediate because the decision looked like a government-funded institution panicking over headlines instead of standing by its own selection panel. In July 2025, after an independent review, Creative Australia reinstated Sabsabi and Dagostino and its chief executive Adrian Collette apologized for the damage caused. (theconversation.com) (abc.net.au) (hyperallergic.com) That is why Sabsabi’s April 2026 interview landed differently: he was no longer speaking as a symbol in somebody else’s culture war, but as an artist describing tempo. His line about giving up being “reactionary” framed the pavilion as slow work shaped over years, not a press-release answer to the latest geopolitical demand. (smh.com.au) (theartnewspaper.com) By February 2026, more concrete details had emerged: Sabsabi was set to show two new works in the Australia Pavilion, and he was also included in the Biennale’s main international exhibition. After a year of arguments over whether he should be there at all, he arrived in Venice with both a national pavilion and a place in the larger curated show. (abc.net.au) (theartnewspaper.com) The thread running through all of this is that a pavilion can look like a passport exercise from the outside while feeling, to the artist inside it, like a test of whether complexity is still allowed. Sabsabi’s answer has been to keep the work on a longer clock than the scandal that tried to define it. (smh.com.au) (khaledsabsabi.com)