Unlike a seat at the football, few politicians make a point of playing up their love of local arts and culture. And until last Thursday, the career of artist Khaled Sabsabi wouldn’t have piqued the interest of many politicians or journalists outside western Sydney.
But politics and art are not easily separated, as Sabsabi must know. His work has often broached political themes, perhaps inevitably — in the late 1970s, Sabsabi’s family moved to Australia after fleeing civil war in Lebanon, where he was born.
Sabsabi began his creative career as a spiky political rapper, before shifting into more conceptual terrain with sound and video pieces, theatre and installations. This month, a strong run of well-received exhibitions and retrospectives over the past decade culminated in the announcement by Australia’s federal arts agency Creative Australia (CA) that Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino would be Australia’s representatives to the 2026 Venice Biennale.
Buttressed by a rigorous selection process that generated a shortlist of six artistic teams, Creative Australia was unequivocal about Sabsabi’s talent and eminence. “We are proud to support this extraordinary team,” boss Adrian Collette gushed. “Khaled Sabsabi’s work, in collaboration with curator Michael Dagostino, reflects the diversity and plurality of Australia’s rich culture, and will spark meaningful conversations with audiences around the world.”
“Diversity”, “plurality” and “meaningful conversations” meant little once Sabsabi’s work received unfavourable coverage in The Australian, which led to Tasmanian Liberal Claire Chandler pressing Foreign Minister Penny Wong about Sabsabi in question time. What is the Albanese government doing, she asked, “allowing Australian taxpayer money to fund an overseas trip for Mr Sabsabi when he has featured the dead Hezbollah terrorist leader Nasrallah in his artwork?” Wong promised to find out.
Chandler’s question related to work by Sabsabi made nearly 20 years ago, including a piece featuring assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and another that depicted the 9/11 attacks. Speaking to the ABC, art critic Sasha Grishin argued that it was “only wilful ignorance that could possibly interpret” Sabsabi’s works as a glorification of terrorism. “Are any of those pieces promoting terrorism or defending terrorism? No, not remotely,” he said.
Within hours of Sabsabi’s mention in Parliament, Arts Minister Tony Burke was asking questions. Creative Australia’s board held an emergency meeting. By 10pm, the media release had been sent out: Sabsabi was dropped. “The board believes a prolonged and divisive debate about the 2026 selection outcome poses an unacceptable risk to public support for Australia’s artistic community,” they stated.
It was a shockingly swift response to an attack Creative Australia should have seen coming. If the arts body thought it was hosing down a controversy, it has badly miscalculated, with the Sabsabi decision having reverberated across Australia’s tight-knit cultural community. In a few short days, Creative Australia has squandered the trust of Australian artists and arts workers, and has undermined the integrity of its own processes.
At least one Creative Australia board member, prominent artist Lindy Lee, has resigned. There have been other significant resignations, including the departure of key staff such as Mikala Tai and Tahmina Maskinyar. Crikey understands there was a walk-out by a number of Creative Australia staff on Friday in the wake of the decision. The five other shortlisted teams have released a public statement condemning the decision. Some are now predicting there will be a boycott of the Australian pavilion, where the Biennale is to be held.
The question that must be asked is: what was Creative Australia thinking? Why didn’t it anticipate the negative media attention, and why wasn’t it ready to defend Sabsabi and Dagostino? News Corp has long subjected Arab and Muslim public figures in Australia to pointed and unfair scrutiny. The war in Gaza has also made public speech in support of Palestinians risky, and there has been nothing covert about Sabsabi’s position.
Asked about Gaza earlier this month, Sabsabi replied: “How can you not be affected when you have family, when you have friends, when your family has inter-married with Palestinian people? We need a way forward.” Sabsabi was also one of the many artists who withdrew from the 2022 Sydney Festival to protest Israeli embassy funding, choosing to stand in “solidarity with the Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause”.
The backlash from News Corp and conservative politicians to Sabsabi’s nomination was predictable. Yet its scrambled response reveals little in the way of contingency planning. Indeed, it’s unclear whether Creative Australia had even thought to brief Burke on the vulnerability of Sabsabi to the culture war tactics mobilised last week, with Wong blindsided in Parliament.
Instead of defending the artists — and their own processes — Creative Australia has hung Sabsabi and Dagostino out to dry, folding under pressure. Its actions reveal an institution ill-equipped to navigate the current political climate, let alone to defend the rights of artists against partisan attack.
Scandalised responses from every quarter of the creative sector show that this episode has serious ramifications, not just for the art world, but for all Australian artists, writers, musicians, performers and artsworkers, and especially those who receive funding from the federal government.
Creative Australia is the direct heir to the old Australia Council for the Arts. It’s not just a funding agency, but is also intended to inherit the old Australia Council’s mandate to champion the arts in Australian society. One of CA’s legislated functions is “to uphold and promote freedom of expression in the arts.” It’s hard to see how that duty has been honoured.
The extraordinary climb-down is all the more worrying because of the political context. Pro-Palestine and anti-war artists, journalists, academics and students have been the targets of organised political attacks for more than a year now, from poets at the State Library of Victoria, students protesting the Gazan conflict at Australian universities, academics such as Randa Abdel-Fattah and even progressive Jewish activists like Sarah Schwartz. If nothing else, the treatment of another Lebanese Australian, Antoinette Lattouf, at the ABC, should have conditioned the leadership of Creative Australia to the likely response to their Biennale announcement.
Independent peer review is the lodestone of Australian public arts funding distribution. The point is to let panels of artists make these judgments, rather than politicians or administrators. This has long enraged conservative Australian politicians, who don’t like the decentralised decision-making, and tend to view artists and writers as their ideological foes. The last major threat to independent peer review was unleashed by George Brandis back in 2015, when, in a fit of monumental and consequential pique, he slashed funding to the Australia Council by 28%, in apparent retaliation for artists boycotting the Sydney Biennale major sponsor Transfield in 2014.
On coming to government, Burke and Anthony Albanese made much of their support for the arts, announcing the Revive national cultural policy in early 2023. New funding was injected, and better treatment promised after the disdain of the Morrison years. Revive signalled the Albanese government’s willingness to win back the trust of Australian creative communities, and to rebuild the confidence of an embattled cultural sector. Creative Australia has imploded most of that good will in just a few days.
Perhaps the most dismaying aspect of the decision is the poverty of the logic advanced by Creative Australia’s board. The argument that controversial art will threaten public support for culture is self-defeating, handing an effective veto to anyone who wants to gin up a campaign. If a couple of articles in The Australian and a single question in the Senate is all it takes to create a controversy about arts funding, then CA might as well pack up and go home.
Many artists are now calling on Creative Australia to revert to its original position and reinstall Sabsabi and Dagostino as Australian representatives at Venice. There’s a reckoning due within Creative Australia: how could the organisation undermine its integrity and independence in this manner? To make matters worse, the agency has announced a review, not of the board’s backflip but of the selection process via which Sabsabi was chosen. The damage inflicted is not just to Creative Australia, but to the standing of artists in Australia.
Such attacks aren’t going away. Art is a front in the culture war globally. A resurgent right has long seen art and artists as emblematic of a “woke” agenda, worthy of punishment and submission. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has appointed right-wing directors to theatres, and encouraged ultranationalist art exhibitions at the Hungarian National Gallery. Donald Trump recently fired the board of the Kennedy Centre and appointed himself as chair, with the storied Washington arts centre expected to radically revise its programming choices, cancelling shows considered suspect.
Chandler must be impressed by her handiwork. We initially concluded this article by saying more questions on the political leanings of grant-supported artists are sure to follow. Indeed, this morning Chandler has signalled the need for a major rethink of how taxpayer money is spent in the arts sector heading into the federal election, saying, “Taxpayers should not be paying for what is essentially a program of political activism masquerading as art and culture.”
The cowardly betrayal of Sabsabi will only embolden Coalition senators, News Limited journalists and other culture warriors to further scrutinise funding allocations and appointments.
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