Ahead of their departure for the world’s most prestigious art fair, a visual artist and a curator have no time to hold grudges against detractors who waged a campaign to cancel them.
Khaled Sabsabi has been given the rare honour of exhibiting at Venice Biennale’s main exhibition and in the Australia Pavilion.
It comes after he and collaborator Michael Dagostino were axed in February 2025 as the country’s official entry.
Sabsabi explained how seeing his spiritual guide recently in Lebanon rooted him after the debacle.
“When I sat with my sheikh, we talked about what does it mean to love someone that may have hurt you or disrespected you,” he said.
“In the end, it came back to: if the divine and the creator are built on mercy and empathy, then why can’t a human aspire to those attributes?”
He described his upcoming installations “as one body with two limbs”.
The duo were ditched after two of Sabsabi’s early artworks, one showing slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and another depicting the 9/11 attacks, were criticised by conservative MPs in federal parliament.
That set off a chain reaction.
Days after glowingly announcing them as the country’s Venice representatives, the national arts funding body, Creative Australia, cancelled their selection and tore up a sizeable contract.
The board’s decision was made on the grounds Sabsabi and Dagostino’s selection would cause a “prolonged and divisive debate”, chief executive Adrian Collette said at the time.
Arts Minister Tony Burke distanced himself from the decision, denying any political interference, while admitting he spoke with the CEO hours before the board meeting that sealed the artists’ fate.
The cancellation spectacularly backfired with more than 4000 people, including some of Australia’s most respected artists, calling for the pair to be reinstated.
Creative Australia chair Robert Morgan has since retired, replaced by Indigenous playwright Wesley Enoch, who apologised and reinstated the pair after an independent review.
“We don’t have time for grudges – life is too short,” Dagostino told AAP.
The pair have been buoyed by community support and solidarity from the arts sector in a galvanising watershed moment.
“If it wasn’t for the support of the people, we wouldn’t be in the position to present two works and it’s a first,” Sabsabi said.
Mr Burke described the rare Venice Biennale plaudit in February as a huge win and “another example of global recognition of Australian art”.
Delving into spirituality and migration, Sabsabi said his work titled “conference of one’s self” encourages the audience to come in with an open mind and heart.
“I brought it back to the individual, it’s about being emotionally inspired and to be able to have moments of reflection and pause,” he said.
The pair emphasised their artistic experiences had been shaped and were grounded in the cultural diversity of western Sydney, which will be displayed to an international audience.
The biennale attracts about 700,000 visitors annually and artists from 99 countries are represented in the 2026 edition.
Artworks are housed in pavilions across expansive gardens. Australia is one of 30 nations with a permanent pavilion.
Dagostino, who also heads up the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, said Sabsabi’s latest work was about “what joins us rather than what divides us”.
“Khaled’s work doesn’t have a fixed position … all art is read through the time it is created and 50 years later it’s read differently,” he said.
The 61st Venice Biennale begins on May 9.
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