Few have travelled as rough a road to the Venice Biennale as Australia’s Khaled Sabsabi. The Lebanese-born Sydney artist was appointed to represent Australia in February 2025, dumped six days later amid bitter political posturing, and finally reappointed later that year in July.
Sabsabi’s supporters are ecstatic over news out of Italy today (February 25) that the artist will not only take over the Australia Pavilion in the Giardini, but he has also been invited to contribute to the Biennale’s main exhibition entitled In Minor Keys (9 May-22 November).
In a statement, the government body Creative Australia says Sabsabi’s double appearance in Venice is “a major historic first for an Australian artist”.
In Minor Keys was organised by the curator Koyo Kouoh, who made her artist selections before her death on 10 May 2025, aged 57.
Sabsabi tells The Art Newspaper that his works for the Australia Pavilion and In Minor Keys are separate but related, and draw on his devotion to Tasawwuf, or Sufism. “(Tasawwuf) is the so-called mystical branch of Islam,” Sabsabi says.
The artist’s Australia Pavilion work is titled conference of one’s self, and is underpinned by the Persian poet and Sufi theoretician Farid al-Din Attar’s Tasawwuf allegory, The Conference of the Birds (1177), about the journey to spiritual enlightenment.
Khaled Sabsabi's Bring the Silence (2018) Photo: Anna Kucera, courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane
The title of Sabsabi’s work for the exhibition In Minor Keys has not yet been released and further details about both works remain confidential for now, although the artist says they are designed to be meaningful whether a visitor stays for minutes or hours.
Sabsabi and his curator Michael Dagostino, the director of Sydney University’s Chau Chak Wing Museum and Seymour Centre, say they had been buoyed throughout their ordeals by the support of the arts community. “For us, it's always been about the work,” Sabsabi says. “It was our only way to see through everything and remain fixated and focused on making the work.”
Simon Mordant, a philanthropist and a global ambassador for Australia’s participation in the Biennale, says Sabsabi had “faced obliteration” as an artist when his appointment was snatched away amid suggestions that two of his early works had glorified terrorists. “I think he’s now going to be the hero of the day in Venice,” Mordant says, adding that the artist is a “peacemaker”. “There's always an element of the community that will seek to characterise him differently from that, and that led to the initial decommissioning,” he says. “But Khaled is someone who tries to bring communities together. Both the works that will be in Venice speak to that theme about uniting people, and I think they're going to be extremely well received.”
The Biennale has pledged to honour Kouoh’s vision for the Biennale with the full support of her family. In Minor Keys will be on view at the Giardini and the Arsenale venues, and in various locations around Venice.
