Creative Australia has conceded the Australian Pavilion at next year’s Venice Biennale may remain empty following its decision to rescind the contracts of the artist and curator it chose to represent the country at the prestigious event.
“We will be doing everything we can…to think about how we use what is a public pavilion to mount something of that is worthy in terms of its representation of Australia,” Creative Australia’s chief executive, Adrian Collette, told a Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday night.
“But we have to draw breath and work out how we are going to approach this singular situation.”
However, facing the late-night inquiry in Canberra, Collette and the chair of Creative Australia’s board, Robert Morgan, refused to resign.
During the questioning, they admitted that despite the board voting to withdraw artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino from Venice almost two weeks ago, it had only formally terminated their contracts hours before Tuesday’s hearing.
They also acknowledged it will be the public purse that picks up the cost of the board’s controversial decision that has provoked widespread condemnation within the Australian arts sector.
“We absolutely acknowledge we have financial obligations to the artist and the curator, so the taxpayer has to fund it,” Collette told the hearing.
“The taxpayer funds everything we do.”
Collette said the delay in terminating the biennale contract was due to Creative Australia needing to seek legal advice.
“Do you reckon maybe you should have got that advice before you sacked the guys?” Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young asked Collette.
“We didn’t have time,” he responded.
The concentrated timeline that led to Sabsabi and Dagostino’s sacking was the focus of much of Tuesday’s hearing, with Collette repeatedly stressing the urgency of the matter, for the sake of “social cohesion”.
“It is not, in my view, about artistic intent,” he said.
“It is about the impact that [the artist’s previous work] would have on the broader public that was the concern. And the impact of art does not reside with an artist’s intent. It resides in the way it is perceived by the public.
“We cannot be blind to the very real risk that the choices we make can also have the potential to trigger divisive narratives.”
When grilled about the involvement of arts minister Tony Burke, represented by senator Tim Ayres at the hearing, Collette said a brief informing the minister of the selection of Sabsabi and Dagostino went to his office on 31 January, seven days before the selection was publicly announced.
In between that brief being sent and the public announcement, Collette was alerted by a Creative Australia staffer to the existence of a work created by the artist some 17 years earlier called You. It was a video installation that featured images of Hassan Nasrallah, the former leader of Hezbollah, a group that was only fully proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the Australian government some 14 years after the work was created.
The work You was not the tipping point however. It was another work, created a year earlier, that sealed the artist’s fate. Collette admitted that neither he or the board were aware of the existence of a work called Thank You Very Much – a montage of the 9/11 attacks with President George W Bush speaking the title words in the 2006 video’s conclusion – until Liberal senator Claire Chandler brought up the choice of Sabsabi for the Venice Biennale during question time on 13 February.
By mid-afternoon that day Morgan was wrangling his board for an emergency meeting. Collette insists that by the time Burke called him, at about 3.30pm, a six o’clock board meeting had already been slated.
“I was shocked when I saw that it [Thank You Very Much] was there,” Ayres said, reading a statement from Burke at the hearing. “And I rang Adrian…to find out what had happened. At that point, he had already determined that they were going to have a board meeting that night. And I went on to say, you know, whatever you decide, I will support you, and I will support Creative Australia.”
“You went into panic mode and you pushed the button,” Hanson-Young put to Collette.
“We anticipate always that the selection of the Venice artists will be controversial, it has been for time immemorial” Collette responded.
“Everyone has a view on the artist, on the art. We don’t resile from any of those decisions. We haven’t in the past, but what happened at that moment was a recognition by me and the board that this entire process was going to be mired in the worst kind of divisive debate.”
Collette said he contacted Sabsabi and Dagostino to inform them of the impending meeting, and again to inform them of the meeting’s outcome an hour and a half later. At no point were the pair given the opportunity to address the board themselves. When Collette tried calling Sabsabi several times later that evening to put the wording of the public statement of his withdrawn commission to him, the artist did not take his calls.
“You failed to do the due diligence, you failed to do the governance, and you failed to look after the artists,” Hanson-Young accused Collette.
Collette admitted Creative Australia had a “huge” amount of work to do to “to restore [the sector’s] confidence in our ability to make independent, expert, informed, arms length decisions” but assured her all other grant making divisions of the organisation had not been weakened by the Venice controversy.
Would he resign, she asked?
“That’s not the way I work,” he said.
“I’m sorry if this decision is misunderstood by the sector, but I don’t back away from this stuff...If it’s in someone else’s gift to say, well, we think you should move on, so be it. But it certainly won’t be something I do.”
Would the chair resign then, the senator pursued?
“No,” Morgan replied.
