There is only one worthwhile test of social cohesion. We may have just failed it
And yet anxiety over possible divisiveness seems to have been the guiding emotional principle applied by the board of Creative Australia, the government's main arts body, when it abruptly sacked Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi and his curator Michael Dagostino as Australia's representatives at the prestigious Venice Biennale next year.
The board, which this week reinstated the duo in a spectacular backflip, originally said it acted to avoid the erosion of public support for Australia's artistic community that might ensue from a 'prolonged and divisive debate'.
It is assumed that a prolonged and divisive debate about an artwork is a bad thing, but it doesn't have to be.
To be fair, the board's anxieties were well-founded.
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It was February 2025 and a caravan full of explosives had been discovered in north-west Sydney. This incident was quickly labelled an anti-Jewish terror plot but was later revealed to be a 'criminal con job'. The Peter Dutton-led Coalition was hammering the Albanese government (then behind in the polls) for being soft on antisemitism. Horrific pictures of burnt and maimed Gazan children aired on television nightly. Jewish-Australians were encountering antisemitism in their day-to-day lives. Pro-Palestine and pro-Israel forces were demonstrating on the streets and clashing in arts organisations.
Sabsabi, stridently pro-Palestine Lebanese-Australian, had made clear his view on Israel when he decided to boycott the 2022 Sydney Festival because it took $20,000 in funding from the Israeli Embassy. His boycott was well before the horror of the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas on innocent Israelis, a day of rape, torture, kidnapping and slaughter from which more and more horror has unspooled.
Sabsabi's views on Israel were known when he was chosen, as was his body of work, which includes a video and sound installation called 'YOU', owned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. 'YOU' features multiple versions of an image of Hassan Nasrallah, former head of Hezbollah.
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