‘It’s Been a Long Journey’: Lebanese-Australian Artist Khaled Sabsabi on His Difficult Path to Venice

On the day I meet the Lebanese-born Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi, his two historic Venice Biennale shows have just been revealed to the world’s media, but he is neither brimming with enthusiasm nor primed to promote his years of hard work. His tone is sombre, his answers laboured.

I soon realise that he is simply exhausted, both emotionally and physically, by what has been a difficult 18 months. As he sits before me, a small cup of black tea clasped between his large hands, I ask him to recount, for what must be the hundredth time, the complex journey that led him to Venice, and what it means to have finally made it here.

Sabsabi was chosen to represent Australia at the 61st edition of the biennale in February 2025, a decision considered a promising follow-up to the country’s 2024 Golden Lion win for Archie Moore’s kith and kin. A statement issued at the time said Sabsabi would present “an installation exploring “spirituality, migration, and the vastness of shared humanity”. Days later, an article in The Australian newspaper described his 2007 multichannel video, You, as “questionable and ambiguous” in its depiction of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The implication was clear: the Lebanon-born artist’s work was not a critique of totalitarian ideologies, but a favourable portrait of the political and armed group. Sabsabi and his curator Michael Dagostino were swiftly dropped by the federal arts body behind the pavilion, Creative Australia.

A few months later, a report into the organisation’s internal processes found that the decision to remove the pair had been based not on the nature of their work, but on the “potential controversy” of selecting an artist from a Middle Eastern background during an “emotive and polarising” time for the region. They were reinstated the same day.

“It is gratifying,” Sabsabi acknowledges, speaking slowly and deliberately. “And it’s a moment of release as well. It’s been a long journey. It’s had its moments. It had its ups and downs like any journey. But personally, I feel that it’s only strengthened the work.”

Dagostino—who has collaborated with Sabsabi for more than 25 years, and sits  beside him in the makeshift office below the Australian pavilion—agrees. “What happened in February was devastating,” he says. “But actually, it created the environment for this to happen.”

The “this” Dagostino refers to is Sabsabi’s double presentation at the biennale. Just weeks after the artist was ousted from the Australian pavilion, curator Koyo Kouoh invited him to exhibit in the biennale’s central exhibition, In Minor Keys, instead. Having then been reinstated as Australia’s representative, Sabsabi is now exhibiting in both spaces, a feat never previously achieved by an Australian artist.

“If you bring hate to the work, you’ll see hate within the work”

I witness the outcome of Sabsabi’s perseverance on the first day of media previews in Venice, when the biennale is far quieter than usual and the chaos that would come to define the 61st edition’s first week is yet to commence. Even so, the installation inside the national pavilion, titled conference of one’s self, presents a welcome moment of peace and contemplation. Sabsabi has erected an octagon-shaped structure from eight towering canvases on to which colourful patterns and shapes have been projected. An ambient soundscape plays in the background; the work’s shape encourages endless rotations. There is a sense of perpetual motion within a dark and at times disorientating setting.

“If you bring yourself to the work then what you see in the work is a reflection of you,” Dagostino says. “If you bring hate to the work, you’ll see hate within the work. You might see yourself within the work or you might see others, but if you are bringing your own lived experiences, and that that is reflected directly back at you.”

Sabsabi’s second multimedia installation, Khalil, sits a short walk away in the Arsenale. The 40-metre work takes its name both from the Arabic for friend and from an honorific used to refer to the prophet Ibrahim across Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Arranged in a circle, in homage to Islamic architecture, the installation’s floating, lamp-like painted canvas features projections of constantly shifting contours and shadows—shapeless at first, but distinctly human on closer inspection. It is an invitation to engage with humane truth-seeking and to dispel preconceived notions of the other that, Sabsabi says, “has its own energy and its own life force”.

“The work doesn’t take,” says Sabsabi. “There is no right, there is no wrong. There is no left, there is no right. It’s up to the individual to bring themselves, their experience, their emotion, their thought, their intellect into the work, and to hopefully be moved by it.”

Plans for the installation began while Sabsabi was living in Bangkok, where he retreated in search of quiet and support following his painfully public dismissal from the Australian pavilion. “While I was there, Khalil came to me in a dream, a vision,” he recalls. This experience is not uncommon for the artist, and he describes it as a blessing. His work was brought to life with the practical and emotional support of friends who lent him studio space in Thailand, and through the financial support of strangers from across the world who donated to the project.

This sense of community is key to Sabsabi’s practice, and it is a concept his lived experience has made him determined to champion. “Coming from a migrant background, as someone that’s been displaced due to civil wars and who’s come to live on somebody else’s stolen land, there’s all these complexities which are shared by millions of people worldwide,” he says.

The artist moved to western Sydney from Tripoli when he was 12, having spent several years living with his brother and grandmother in the midst of Lebanon’s civil war. Writing in a 2016 essay published on his website, he recalled this time through the scent of bodies, piled high on the back of a truck where families searched for their dead, and the sound of bullets passing close to his face as he ran. “The last memory I have of my early life was standing in front of my grandmother and not wanting to say goodbye or to let her go before being taken out of Lebanon,” he wrote.

During his early years in Australia, Sabsabi was regularly subjected to racist abuse and violence and, as a result, found community among other children from migrant backgrounds. During the early 1980s, he discovered hip hop and became both a performer and producer; he describes this music has having changed his outlook on life and defining his focus throughout the next decade. Eventually this led him to theatre and digital production, which he shared with “disadvantaged” youth, newly arrived migrants and Sydney’s non-English speaking communities in the suburb of Liverpool, developing the socially engaged practice he continues today.

Throughout this time, Sabsabi made music, sound and site-specific installations whenever he could and, in 2002, a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts allowed him to visit Lebanon, marking a turning point in his practice and his understanding of himself. On his return to western Sydney, where he still lives and works, the artist began to exhibit more widely, gaining recognition for his explorations of faith and conflict, and his attempts to forge understanding across cultures and geographies. Among his most notable works, thanks in part to its role in the events of last year, is 2006’s Thank you very much, which combines jumbled images of the 9/11 attacks with archival footage of former US president George W Bush repeating the work’s titular phrase.

Despite his now relatively settled life in Australia, Sabsabi’s Lebanese heritage remains a driving force for his work. With conflict once again raging across the nation, how has he been able to focus on finalising his biennale works? “Well, you wouldn’t be human if you weren’t challenged by what is happening in the world at the moment,” he reflects. “With everything—the uncertainties, the brutality of war, the situations with millions of people affected. But I do believe that we must, eventually, come to a juncture where we’re able to sit down and find another way.”

The artist takes this hopeful approach, at least in part, from the teachings of taṣawwuf, or Sufism, with which he reconnected during his 2002 trip to Lebanon. Defined as a mystical, spiritual dimension of Islam, it is an ancient and complex practice that many consider a lifelong journey, and which he still studies rigorously. For this reason, my next question is perhaps somewhat unfair: I ask the artist what it is most essential I learn about the practice, and what the belief means most clearly to him. “It’s difficult to break it down,” he says patiently. “But it’s about defeating the ego. If you can defeat the ego, you can move on to start to connect with the inner workings of the heart, which, in return, will give you much more clarity about who you are.”

“You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t challenged by what is happening in the world at the moment”

Sounding as free as I have yet heard him, he goes on to explain the inner and the outer—not physical spaces but versions of self that, for those who follow Sufism, must be examined, improved and maintained in search of love and wisdom. Known as the stages of self, this process is achieved in seven steps, a number mirrored in the canvases presented in conference of one’s self. The final, eighth canvas is Sabsabi’s own addition: a representation of enlightenment and completion.

“Taṣawwuf allows you to look at things differently or interrogate yourself differently,” he explains. “It’s about multiplicity of being as a self, therefore you’re able to deal with different affairs of the self, whether it be love, whether it be annihilation.” Both of these conflicting experiences are, Sabsabi says, at play within his own life—when our conversation began, the weight of their presence was palpable.

By the time the harassed pavilion staff politely inform me that our meeting must draw to a close, Sabsabi strikes me as being somewhat calmer. Perhaps the artist has been soothed by discussions of his deep faith; perhaps he is simply relieved to be free. Whatever the reasoning, his change in tone is revealing. It is not stoicism that defines Sabsabi, or saw him through his long journey to Venice, but a combination of resilience and generosity that is unmistakable in his practice. —[O]

Khaled Sabsabi, conference of one’s self (until 22 November) at the Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. 

Main image: Khaled Sabsabi, Conference of one’s self (2026). Pavilion of Australia, 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia.