A political and moral reflection on the Sabsabi Venice Biennale Affair.

Like many, I was gobsmacked by Creative Australia’s announcement to reverse its decision for artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino to represent Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale. However, I have also been heartened by the Art sector’s support for the artists and the calls for reversing the artist’s cancellation. The public critique and analysis of this fiasco has been thorough, sustained, and surprisingly unified by commentators such as Richard Bell, Ben Eltham, David Pledger and Alison Crorgan, among others.

What interests me is what flows from that salvo emanating from conservative Australia. After all, it was utterly predictable and should have been anticipated by both the Arts Minister Tony Burke, his advisers and Creative Australia.

Why did Burke’s advisers and the relevant staff at Creative Australia not prepare for such a predictable attack? To assume, in the context of the Trumpian new world order, that our culture war skirmishes would not be ignited with Temu Trumpian accelerant is naive in the extreme.

Notably, as Richard Bell pointed out, the stone throwing Murdoch press insurgent, Yoni Bashan has partisan form. The self-described “business gossip” and crime columnist at The Australian, who broke the story was also the first Australian journalist to be embedded with Israeli forces in Gaza. This speaks volumes about where his politics are situated in the context of Middle Eastern geopolitics.

It seems that Bashan was intent on reading what he wants to see in Sabsabi’s work - You. “It’s not for me to figure out or solve the mystery of what Khaled Sabsabi thinks about Hassan Nasrallah…” “This is all a bit too flutey for me, this sort of stuff,” and yet by citing the image of Nasrallah as proof of You’s antisemitism, even though the image material is in the public domain and has been run innumerable times in news articles and programs, where the context is seen not as controversial but informative.

Good art is situated in the liminal. It provokes and stimulates emotion in a contextual framework. It incites questioning of rusted-on beliefs. It invites us to consider new ways of seeing and, therefore, new ways of feeling and understanding the subject at hand. But only if the viewer is willing.

Clearly, Bashan’s reading of Sabsabi’s work was not shared with the 61,276 people who visited the three-month-long MCA exhibition in 2009. None of them complained that the work was antisemitic, nor were there any protests.

The weaponised article by Bashan was taken up by the newly-installed Coalition Arts spokesperson Liberal Claire Chandler in Senate Question Time, catching Penny Wong on the back foot when she stated that she was unaware of the details of Sabsabi's work and said "I agree with you that any glorification of the Hezbollah leader Nasrallah is inappropriate, and I've expressed those views previously, and I'll certainly get further information for you."

The Glorification of Hezbollah leader Nasrallah? Where did that come from? Chandler, falsely, in her follow-up question, then asserted that Sabsabi was promoting Asama Bin Laden in another work, Thank you very much.

If an image is used in an artwork, it does not follow that it is an act of “glorification” or “promotion” of the image subject. If the same image material is used in the context of current affairs or news, such allegations would not be made.

In contemporary art, context is everything. A considered reading of both You and Thank you very much does not lead one to such conclusions unless, of course, a pre-existing (and often intractable) interpretation is premised.

In 2001, Khaled Sabsabi said

“The dual identities that develop through the migrant experience can create anxiety and uncertainty but can also generate awareness. Going between Arab culture and Western or Australian culture, you have the ability to experience and see and to analyse both cultures, both traditions, both histories”.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney described You by stating on their website,

“With YOU, Sabsabi looks to draw attention to the brutality of war and of the media-controlled image in the service of ideology-driven propaganda. The title of the work is significant in that it addresses each of us, as individuals, invited to make choices when confronted with media’s ability to vilify or deify.”

https://www.mca.com.au/collection/artworks/2009.153/

My Reading is that Thank you very much is a video montage juxtaposing snippets of video from the 9/11 attack on the New York Twin Towers against a video quote of George W Bush saying “Thank you very much” three weeks before declaring the War on Terror. This is a work of irony implying that, as a result of the attack, Bush had the permission structure and justification for unleashing his own Neocon jihad on Afghanistan and Iraq to deliver them democracy and simultaneously divine punishment through his War on Terror.

Sabsabi said in the Guardian about the work,

“It [was] made 20 years ago and it’s a critique of the brutalisation and the savageness of war … If people actually watch the 18-second video work, they will realise when those images of the horrific terrorist attack that was taking place … they’ll hear screams of torment and torture. It looked at the power of media and how media can be used as a form of propaganda … that changed the way we see the world, the way we stereotype Muslims.”

It is precisely because Creative Australia did not understand the artist’s previous works nor anticipate and prepare the Government as to their nature that they could not confidently or adequately defend the reasoning behind awarding the Australian Venice Biennale representation to Sabsabi and Dagostino.

Instead of pushing back on Chandlers and Bashan’s narrow weaponised interpretation, Creative Australia should have sought opinions and advice from expert art theorists. Instead, Creative Australia chose the cowardly option - the cancellation of Subsabi’s and Dagostino’s contract. In doing so, this act violated Creative Australia’s core objectives as mandated in the Creative Australia Act 2023 of ”supporting artistic excellence, uphold freedom of expression, foster diversity in Australian arts practice, recognise and reward significant contributions in the arts, and promote understanding of the arts”.

There are now consequences that flow from this successful Tory ideological salvo.

In a recent article on Sky News, the Director of the Institute of Public Affairs' Foundations of Western Civilisation program, Dr Bella d’Abrera, stated freedom of expression should not rely on government funding. “This kind of spending will not end until the decision-making is taken out of the hands of ideologically-driven bureaucrats and put back into the hands of the Arts Minister,” she said.

Sky News quoted Sen Claire Chandler, “I want to see our arts sector promoting itself around the country and making itself accessible to as many audiences as possible, particularly in regional and rural areas… When Australians are going out for a night of entertainment, they're not necessarily doing so because they want to hear more about politics.”

It is now apparent that the Liberal arts policy is for arts funding to be controlled by the Arts Minister and focused on non-political entertainment! Schlager and macramé will do well when we live under a potential Dutton Federal Government. Perhaps Chandler might renominate Menzies’ 1958 captain’s call for the Venice Biennial - Arthur Streeton colonial landscapes.

This is a return to the Brandis doctrine where arts funding is not decided by peers with expert knowledge of their art form but by the Minister of the day’s tastes, opinions, and quibbles. It means a possible end (again) of the Australian National Cultural policy as the agreed guideline for decision making in the arts.

This is the consequence of the lack of critical and strategic thinking by Arts bureaucrats and a lack of political spine by our current Arts Minister. Instead, the Arts sector must call out what these attacks on Sabsabi actually are: ideological projections and mistruths. They must not stand unchecked.

The act of not anticipating incoming ideological attacks, accepting these untrue projections on an artwork's intent or simply doing nothing has consequences. As does the sequences of insipid excuses, poorly thought-out defences, and backflips.

The consequences are an increasingly polarised and unequal society. These tactics are the meat and potatoes tactics of fascism, racism, fundamentalist religious groups and any form of politics where one self-interested, self-described group who wishes to subjugate and oppress others. This affair is a strategic attack on a cosmopolitan Australia.

Its worth reflecting on the words of Mike Burgess, Director-General of Security in charge of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, who recently said on ABC Radio,

“We've lost the art of civil debate in society. It's okay to argue. It's okay to disagree but Jesus, I wish people would be more curious to just understand, well, why do you think that? Help me understand that. I still disagree with you at the end but at least I've learned something.

At the moment we seem to say - your wrong and therefore, you must be bad and kind of name call. We are disrespectful. I don't think that helps. Robust debate is absolutely brilliant. Lawful protest is absolutely fine. It's just more edge to it, more anger to it or confrontation to it and that's leading to an increase in tensions which leads to inflamed language which can lead to violence.”

Sociopolitical polarisation emboldens the Right, MAGA and the copycat Australian Liberal Party and elements of NSW Labor, to crusade on issues such as antisemitism as a political flag of convenience to legislate draconian laws that can be used against intellectuals, artists and any citizen with an opinion counter to that of the crusader. There are numeriouse examples: the recent draconian anti-protest laws, the criminalisation of racist speech as enacted by the NSW Mimms Government and the proposed cancellation of citizenship and deportation of criminals through Dutton’s current election referendum proposal.

In the wake of Trump’s Project 2025, it's not a stretch for artists like Sabsabi and his supporters to be potentially subject to such laws in the future. This is a frightening comparable situation to the US case of the arrest and current attempt to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University Palestinian protest negotiator accused, without evidence, of “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity”. This case, sadly, is but one example.

What we are experiencing is a multi-spectrum assault by the Global Right on democracy and artistic, academic and civil freedom both here and internationally. Antisemitism is being used by the right as cover for furthering totalitarian objectives. We can point to the recently revised definition of antisemitism adopted by Australia's 39 universities. The wording invites a conflation of the criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The risk is a critique of the state of Israel, which can be conceived as an attack on Jewish collectivity. Yet Israel is far from being a monolithic state given that 27% of the Israeli population does not identify as Jewish and more Jews live outside of the country than do within. The logic of a critique of the Israeli state, its policies and actions as an attack on all Jews simply doesn’t hold.

The far Right tolerates the cognitive dissonance of conspiracy theories such as Holocaust denialism, the multiple George Soros false narratives, the trappings of Nazism, white replacement theory (remember the Charlottesville Neo-Nazi chant of “Jews will not replace us” and the whitewashing by Trump of the marchers as “very nice people on both sides”), the Musk roman salute and in Australia the enthusiastic adoption of Dural caravan bomb plot to justify the NSW criminalisation of acts of antisemitism. Social polarisation is created through the Global Right’s agitation within the cracks of identity politics. This services their authoritarian goals of minority oppression and disempowerment while claiming virtuous intent.

It’s a slippery slope we are on, and we are unwittingly sliding slowly down it.

Art and music have an important role here as they have the capacity to create and explore the heterotopic space where welded-on opposing ideological positions can co-exist in opposition to one another. In the case of reflecting on the contradictions of Middle Eastern geopolitics, the toxic intractable visions of a religiously motivated Zionist utopia exist in counterbalance to a pre-1948 free Palestine utopia where Israel no longer exists. The sad reality is that these polar opposite utopian visions require the elimination of each other.

Daniel Barenboim once wisely pointed out,

“Many Israelis dream that when they wake up, the Palestinians will be gone, and the Palestinians dream that when they wake up, the Israelis will be gone. Both sides can no longer differentiate between dream and reality, and this is the psychological core of the problem.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/may/14/israelandthepalestinians.classicalmusic

Art works like "You and Thank You" help fracture these binary paradigms and can help us transcend this hateful blindness.

This year’s Venice Biennale choice may make many of Australia’s politically influential art philanthropists uncomfortable. However, any contribution to help dismantle these delusions through reason, art and music and, in turn, nurture empathy of the other should be encouraged and supported because, ultimately, this is the only moral choice.

So, when we now examine the justification for the cancellation Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino in this broader context, were the stated reasons ever going to cut it?

The CEO of Creative Australia, Adrian Collette’s and the Creative Australia’s Board excuse was the decision was made in the interests of “social cohesion” and to have continued with the contract would have had the “potential to trigger divisive narratives”. Later, in Senate Estimates, he further lamented the “relentless daily threats to social cohesion” and justified their actions by citing through obfuscated weasel words the importance of Creative Australia’s “social licence”.

Wherever Collette derives his moral authority, it is not derived from the objectives of the Creative Australia Act or the extensively consulted Australian cultural policy - Revive: a place for every story, a story for every place, where he should have sought guidance.

5,500 people in the arts signed a letter to Tony Burke asking the minister to reverse the cancellation of Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale. This wrong needs to be righted by reappointing them to represent Australia at the 2025 Venice Biennale.

Collette, the Creative Australia board chair Robert Morgan and the board, by their unanimous decision to dump Sabsabi and Dagostino, clearly no longer have the confidence of the Arts community, making their positions untenable. This is why Collette and Morgan must go. This is why the Creative Australia board also must go. This is further evidenced by a growing number (500+) of people who signed a recent letter seeking their resignations or sacking and the rightful reinstatement of Sabsabi and Dagostino.

The community's social licence has been breached, not in the way that Collette expounded but because it is contrary to what the people of Australia’s parliament intended in the passing of the Creative Australia Act 2023.

Finally, Penny Wong or Tony Burke, if elected or not, need to correct the parliamentary record, apologise on behalf of the Albanese Government to Sabsabi and Dagostino and, state that Khaled Sabsabi’s works You and Thank you very much do not “glorify“ the Hezbollah leader Nasrallah or “promote” Osama Bin Laden. It is essential that both the reputations of Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino are publicly and officially rehabilitated, as they were defamed under parliamentary privilege.

This whole episode is not just a failing of competence and governance but, more importantly, a betrayal of the expert selectors, applicants for the Venice Biennale and the extended arts community. It is a demonstration of cowardice and a profound moral failing.

Thank you very much.

Jon Perring