Published: 18 February 2025
Last updated: 18 February 2025
Who is Khaled Sabsabi?
Khaled Sabsabi is a Lebanese-born, Muslim Australian multi-media artist, who lives in Western Sydney. He began his creative life as a hip hop artist and has experimented with various media, but is best known for large-scale installation pieces. He has held more than 90 exhibitions and has been collected in many Australian galleries, including the Art Gallery of NSW, Queensland Art Gallery and Australian War Memorial.
What is his art about?
Sabsabi describes his art as focusing on place, displacement, identity and ideological differences associated with migrant experiences and marginalisation. His work often deals with his identity as a Muslim and with the Middle East.
One of his best known pieces, 70,000 Veils, is described as “a reflection on Prophet Muhammad’s teachings on what separates the individual from the divine”. It includes 100 digital video channels each playing unique sequences of 700 photographs from the 10,000 Sabsabi took for the work, which he then layered with digital and painted effects.
Why is his work controversial?
Two artworks have prompted concerns.
You (2007) held by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney is a video installation showing Hassan Nasrallah, then leader of the terrorist organisation Hezbollah, reciting the words “O most honourable, pure, and generous people, may God's peace, mercy, and blessings be upon you”, taken from a speech celebrating victory over Israel in 2006. Voices and images are manipulated in the video, and the MCA describes the work as including the use of beams of light that "suggest divine illumination". The artwork has been criticised as glorifying Hezbollah, a banned terrorism organisation in Australia.
Comments2
Ian Grinblat18 February at 01:59 am
‘Artist Lindy Lee, who was on the Creative Australia board which voted unanimously to withdraw Sabsabi’s appointment subsequently resigned, telling the Sydney Morning Herald the board’s decision was made in “good faith” but “nobody except those involved can ever know how fraught and heartbreaking that meeting was”.’
Is Lindy Lee saying that she was uncomfortable to be part of that unanimous vote? Why did she not cast a dissenting vote?
Ian Grinblat18 February at 01:57 am
Well, how fortunate that the artists have the private resources to present at Venice.
Censorship is a heavy word to use for such a fraught matter; we cannot know if a “significant” artist today will enjoy the same standing in even 50 years. Our art gallery storerooms hold many sentimental paintings from late Victorian times; widely popular in their day, they are no longer displayed.