Few have travelled as tough a highway to the Venice Biennale as Australia’s Khaled Sabsabi. The Lebanese-born Sydney artist was appointed to symbolize Australia in February 2025, dumped six days later amid bitter political posturing, and eventually reappointed later that yr in July.
Sabsabi’s supporters are ecstatic over information out of Italy as we speak (February 25) that the artist is not going to solely take over the Australia Pavilion within the Giardini, however he has additionally been invited to contribute to the Biennale’s principal exhibition entitled In Minor Keys (9 Might-22 November).
In an announcement, the federal government physique Inventive Australia says Sabsabi’s double look in Venice is “a serious historic first for an Australian artist”.
In Minor Keys was organised by the curator Koyo Kouoh, who made her artist picks earlier than her demise on 10 Might 2025, aged 57.
Sabsabi tells The Artwork Newspaper that his works for the Australia Pavilion and In Minor Keys are separate however associated, and draw on his devotion to Tasawwuf, or Sufism. “(Tasawwuf) is the so-called mystical department of Islam,” Sabsabi says.
The artist’s Australia Pavilion work is titled convention of 1’s self, and is underpinned by the Persian poet and Sufi theoretician Farid al-Din Attar’s Tasawwuf allegory, The Convention of the Birds (1177), in regards to the journey to non secular enlightenment.
Khaled Sabsabi’s Carry the Silence (2018) Photograph: Anna Kucera, courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane
The title of Sabsabi’s work for the exhibition In Minor Keys has not but been launched and additional particulars about each works stay confidential for now, though the artist says they’re designed to be significant whether or not a customer stays for minutes or hours.
Sabsabi and his curator Michael Dagostino, the director of Sydney College’s Chau Chak Wing Museum and Seymour Centre, say they’d been buoyed all through their ordeals by the assist of the humanities neighborhood. “For us, it is all the time been in regards to the work,” Sabsabi says. “It was our solely option to see by means of every thing and stay fixated and targeted on making the work.”
Simon Mordant, a philanthropist and a world ambassador for Australia’s participation within the Biennale, says Sabsabi had “confronted obliteration” as an artist when his appointment was snatched away amid recommendations that two of his early works had glorified terrorists. “I feel he’s now going to be the hero of the day in Venice,” Mordant says, including that the artist is a “peacemaker”. “There’s all the time a component of the neighborhood that can search to characterise him in a different way from that, and that led to the preliminary decommissioning,” he says. “However Khaled is somebody who tries to carry communities collectively. Each the works that will likely be in Venice converse to that theme about uniting folks, and I feel they are going to be extraordinarily properly obtained.”
The Biennale has pledged to honour Kouoh’s imaginative and prescient for the Biennale with the complete assist of her household. In Minor Keys will likely be on view on the Giardini and the Arsenale venues, and in numerous areas round Venice.
