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This year, no best artist or best national pavilion prizes will be awarded after the jury unanimously resigned in late April. (Supplied: Andrea Rossetti)<\/p>\n
He also arrives in Venice after being controversially appointed, sacked, then reinstated to represent Australia<\/a> at the biennale.<\/p>\n “My [art] practice has always been about making,” he says.<\/p>\n “As artists it’s about making; how it’s exhibited, where it’s exhibited becomes a secondary thing.”<\/p>\n That rocky road to Venice led Sabsabi to make history. He’s the only Australian artist, and one of only three artists in the event’s 131-year history, to present work in both a national pavilion and the biennale’s main exhibition<\/a>, this year titled In Minor Keys and curated by the late Cameroon-born, Swiss-based art curator Koyo Kouoh.<\/p>\n There, Sabsabi presents an immersive installation, khalil, in the Arsenale, the sprawling warehouses that once housed the munitions of Venice’s powerful navy.<\/p>\n “For me it’s a testament to Australian art and Australian artists, which is really important, following on from Archie,” Sabsabi says.<\/p>\n How Sabsabi came to find himself in Venice in such special circumstances can be traced back to a tumultuous week in February 2025.<\/p>\n The week began with the announcement Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino had been selected to represent Australia<\/a>, and ended with the board of Creative Australia rescinding their appointments<\/a> after a late-night crisis meeting described as “fraught and heartbreaking” by artist Lindy Lee, who also resigned from the board in response.<\/p>\n Although the machinations behind Creative Australia’s decision to terminate Sabsabi’s appointment remain largely obscured from public view, its origins are in a short exchange between Tasmanian Liberal senator and opposition arts spokesperson Claire Chandler and then-acting Prime Minister Penny Wong on the floor of the federal Senate during Question Time.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dropped artist Sabsabi speaks out<\/a><\/p>\n Artist Khaled Sabsabi has said the decades-old artworks that triggered Creative Australia’s decision to dump him have been “grossly misrepresented”.<\/p>\n Hoping to score political points from the government over an issue of her own making, Chandler inferred Sabsabi’s appointment, based on her reading of You 2007, a work that has been in the collection of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) without controversy since 2009, risked exacerbating “appalling anti-Semitism” in Australia.\u00a0<\/p>\n Chandler’s inference set off a chain of events that saw federal Arts Minister Tony Burke put in a call to Creative Australia chair Adrian Collette, who shortly afterward assembled the board for the emergency meeting. On February 13, Creative Australia’s board announced it had unanimously voted not to proceed with Sabsabi’s appointment citing it would cause a “prolonged and divisive debate about the 2026 selection outcome” that posed “an unacceptable risk” to public support for Australia’s artistic community.<\/p>\n In the maelstrom that ensued, Sabsabi returned to his art.<\/p>\n Listen to Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino on The Radio National Hour<\/a><\/p>\n “Khaled was determined to make the work; we just knew we were going to show it in Venice,” Dagostino says.\u00a0<\/p>\n While the prospect the doors of the Australia Pavilion might remain closed in 2026 remained a very real possibility, Sabsabi got to work in fellow Australian artist Abdul Abdullah’s studio in Bangkok. It’s here both works for the Venice Biennale were produced.<\/p>\n First came khalil, the work originally planned for the national pavilion, a 40-metre-long painting covered in a dense forest of interwoven, gnarled lines interspersed with figurative elements applied with a painterly wash of subdued blue and purple hues.\u00a0<\/p>\n Among the sometimes frenetic brush marks is a scattering of discernible objects and images and the occasional face, some appearing to be in a state of anguish.\u00a0<\/p>\n Khalil forms part of the major biennale exhibition In Minor Keys, which Dagostino tells ABC Arts is about “the space in between”. (Supplied: Milani Gallery\/Khaled Sabsabi)<\/p>\n While the painting alone gives an impression of the cacophony of noise, emotions and torment Sabsabi may have endured during its making, in the finished work the painting and its details are obscured by a 64-minute video layer of abstract figures and forms superimposed over the top.<\/p>\n “When I painted khalil, it didn’t have a home. It’s important to acknowledge that,” Sabsabi explains.\u00a0<\/p>\n After it was completed, conference of one’s self, the work that now inhabits the Australia Pavilion, appeared “in a vision, in a dream”.<\/p>\n In March 2025 curator Koyo Kouoh reached out to discuss Sabsabi’s possible participation in In Minor Keys. A few months later it was confirmed.<\/p>\n Before her death from cancer at age 57 in May 2025, Kouoh allotted Sabsabi’s khalil arguably one of the most prominent spaces in the Arsenale complex; it’s the first work visitors encounter from the main entrance.<\/p>\n In the vastness of the Arsenale, khalil holds its own. The canvas screens that have been unfurled around the space are in perfect proportion to the sturdy brick columns that buttress the roof of the ancient warehouse.\u00a0<\/p>\n Upon entering, visitors are invited to step inside the illuminated canvas spiral that greets them \u2014 and by and large almost every visitor does so. Stand too close to the canvas and you are in the projection itself; it’s at that point many visitors take selfies and portraits as frenetic lines and constantly evolving video forms dance across their faces.<\/p>\n Khaled Sabsabi to take two installations to Venice<\/a><\/p>\n The Lebanese Australian artist, controversially dropped then reinstated to represent Australia at the biennale, brings two installations to the ‘Olympics of the art world’.<\/p>\n A week after Kouoh died, Creative Australia reinstated Sabsabi following an independent review that revealed the organisation lacked basic risk management and crisis-handling procedures<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/ecd8f7c7c69c777f744a122f43ff0800.jpeg\")
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