04-07-2025
Unanswered questions in wake of Creative Australia's backflip on Venice Biennale artist Khaled Sabsabi
And so we return to where we began almost six months ago.
Following an external review and months of outrage in the arts community, the artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino are once again Australia's representatives to the 2026 Venice Biennale, after Creative Australia's latest backflip.
The February decision to remove the pair — a week after their Biennale selection was celebrated — led to Creative Australia resignations, damaged the funding body's relationship with the arts sector, and sullied the public reputation of an artist.
Sabsabi and Dagostino said in a statement that having their Biennale selection reinstated "offers a sense of resolution and allows us to move forward with optimism and hope after a period of significant personal and collective hardship".
And while acting Creative Australia chair Wesley Enoch praised the board's "very big heart" for engaging in a review of the decision to scrap Sabsabi "with integrity and thoughtfulness and mov[ing] forward", the impacts of the month-long arts scandal will not immediately be forgotten.
Nor does Sabsabi's reinstatement mean that the many questions surrounding his Biennale saga are now answered.
"The [external] review, for all the detail, does not actually clarify the decision-to-cancel process," Adelaide Writers Week director and senior arts commentator Louise Adler says.
"What we do know is that the decision to cancel [Sabsabi and Dagostino] was a reaction to political pressure."
After concerns were raised in February in parliament by senator Claire Chandler and in The Australian newspaper about two of Sabsabi's earlier artworks, Creative Australia's board scheduled an emergency meeting and came to a unanimous decision to withdraw the Venice Biennale commission.
At a later Senate Estimates, when senator Sarah Hanson-Young asked Creative Australia CEO Adrian Collette why legal advice had not been sought prior to the decision being made, it led to the following exchange:
Adrian Collette — We didn't have time.
Sarah Hanson-Young — You didn't have time?
AC — No, we didn't have time.
SHY — According to who?
AC — According to us. We had to make that decision very quickly.
Esther Anatolitis, the editor of Meanjin and former executive director of the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA), says it's still unclear why that was the case.
"The issue really is, what was the hurry? And why did they perceive that as a crisis, when all that happened was that there was one critical and factually incorrect attack on the work which, as Blackhall and Pearl's report says, was capable of being defended by Creative Australia."
Instead, the board's decision to drop Sabsabi sparked a massive backlash from the arts community, and a review was commissioned to examine the process, but not the merit, of the decisions that were made.
The review's report states that Creative Australia was not "appropriately prepared" for "what, inevitably, was going to be a controversial decision".
The report notes that the process of selecting Sabsabi and Dagostino was generally the same as it had been for 2024's representative, Archie Moore, who won the Golden Lion for his work at the Biennale.
But "the external social and political context, particularly in late January-early February 2025, was profoundly different."
It wasn't Sabsabi's proposal for the Biennale that was contentious, though.
Instead, the report notes: "The source of potential controversy was seen to lie in the fact of selecting any artist with heritage connected to the Middle East at a time when conflict in that region was so emotive and polarising."
Adler says it beggars belief that this climate was not sufficiently considered by Creative Australia.
"There's not an arts organisation in the country that hasn't had to provide their increasingly risk-averse boards with risk assessments.
"If Creative Australia was blindsided by the complexities of inviting Sabsabi, it suggests either a worrying level of naivety or a political judgement that a Brown artist from the western suburbs will tick a whole lot of boxes.
Creative Australia's actions don't exist in a vacuum.
A court found this month that the ABC had unfairly terminated Antoinette Lattouf because of her political opinion. Justice Darryl Rangiah found external pressure from "pro-Israel lobbyists" had played a role in the ABC's decision. The ABC's new managing director, Hugh Marks, has since conceded the ABC acted out of turn.
Anatolitis argues that the Lattouf matter is "a parallel example of a privileged bypassing of a normal rigorous complaints procedure … knowing that it would fail … in order to achieve the outcome that the vexatious complainants intended".
Adler also draws a link between the two events.
"As with the suppression of the names of the "Lawyers for Israel" who campaigned for Lattouf's sacking, those who briefed Senator Chandler will probably never be outed." Adler says.
Shortly after Creative Australia announced it had dropped Sabsabi, Monash University decided to postpone an exhibition curated by Stolon Press at their gallery, MUMA, featuring artwork by Sabsabi.
"There's no question that Creative Australia's decision to cancel the invitation to Michael and to Khaled influenced Monash's decision to postpone the Stolon Press exhibition," Rebecca Coates, the director of MUMA, says.
"We were dealing with a very singular interpretation of two still images from a very complex moving image artwork that were being used … as a means of progressing an argument.
In May, Monash University also backflipped on its decision to "indefinitely postpone" its exhibition featuring Sabsabi, and in June the exhibition opened.
Coates believes that has had an influence on the national arts funding body.
"I think Monash's decision to subsequently proceed with the Stolon Press exhibition, which included Khaled's contribution as a collaborator, was inevitably part of the context in which Creative Australia decided to proceed with Khaled and Michael's representation at Venice," she says.
Many within the arts have celebrated Sabsabi and Dagostino's reinstatement.
However, opposition to the selection remains. Julian Leeser, shadow minister for the arts, told ABC Radio National Breakfast: "I think Creative Australia's made the wrong decision. The representative of Australia on the world stage should reflect our values and to reinstate this artist as our representative at Biennale and to give them taxpayers' funds I think flies in the face of those values.
"Creative Australia has responsibilities to the taxpayer and the broader Australian community. I believe those issues continue to remain and that I believe Creative Australia should not have unmade their decision that they previously made to withdraw Mr Sabsabi from this exhibition at this time," he said.
Coates interprets the decision differently; she see it as "a signal of renewal, growth and connectedness and, I believe, a shared future".
"Some of these issues are coming up at such a rapid pace that the systems that were relevant to us even two years ago are no longer fit for purpose. And we, as a sector, have to be engaged in much more rigorous conversations around the messaging, the risk assessment, and how we go forward."
For his part, Sabsabi told Nine newspapers in April: "I'm an artist, not a politician.
"And my work for over 35 years is about finding ways to converse through complexity."
He may now be in a position to hold that conversation a little more freely.
