Artist Khaled Sabsabi was abruptly dropped as Australia’s 2026 Venice Biennale representative after a high-profile publication raised questions about a past work by him depicting a Hezbollah leader.
The announcement was made by Creative Australia, the pavilion’s organizer, after work hours in Australia and did not outright mention the controversy. It described the decision to nix Sabasabi’s pavilion—which was announced just six days ago—as a “unanimous” one and said the decision applied to the exhibition’s “artistic team,” including curator Michael Dagostino. Creative Australia promised a review of the selection process.
“Creative Australia is an advocate for freedom of artistic expression and is not an adjudicator on the interpretation of art,” the organization said in a statement. “However, the Board believes a prolonged and divisive debate about the 2026 selection outcome poses an unacceptable risk to public support for Australia’s artistic community and could undermine our goal of bringing Australians together through art and creativity.”
ARTnews has reached out to Dagostino, Sabsabi, and Creative Australia for comment.
Earlier this week, the Australian, one of the most widely distributed publications in Australia, ran an article by Yoni Bashan and Nick Evans in which they labeled Sabsabi’s pavilion a “creative approach to racism.”
They singled out Sabsabi’s 2007 video installation You, which features appropriated footage of Hassan Nasrallah, a leader of the militant group Hezbollah who was assassinated last year. In the video, the Lebanese artist shows Nasrallah addressing a crowd in Beirut after the end of a 2006 war between Lebanon and Israel. The footage is digitally manipulated and at one point features rays of lights emerging from his face, a gesture that the work’s owner, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, describes as being “suggestive of a divine illumination.”
Some have said You is a response to racism experienced by Sabsabi in Australia after he and his family fled Lebanon in 1978, during a period when his home country was in the midst of a civil war. A 2018 Vulture Magazine profile of Sabsabi states that he was approaching Nasrallah from the point of view of “a Muslim immigrant in an increasingly Islamophobic world” and said that the work is meant to portray “a sense of reverence bestowed upon Hezbollah in resisting the Israeli Defense Force.”
The Australian article published this week described the piece differently, labeling You’s approach to Nasrallah “questionable and ambiguous.” Then it went on to note that Sabsabi had boycotted the 2022 Sydney Festival, which had that year accepted $20,000 in sponsorship from the Israeli embassy in Canberra.
The article claimed that Dagostino had supported Sabsabi’s boycott, then asked: “Which leaves us wondering why Creative Australia would choose two people who favour boycotts of Israel, one of them who seemingly lauded a terrorist leader in his past work, to be the custodians of our nation’s reputation at this prestigious biennale in Venice?”
Viral posts on social media seemed to reiterate similar views. One tweet with more than 1,000 likes says of You, “This art does not represent Australia. And it’s more than a massive slap in the face to Jewish Australians.” That tweet, which contains a spelling error, goes on to claim that the work is “the best art in Australia – according to Labor and their jihadist constuients.”
Creative Australia’s pavilion to nix Sabsabi’s pavilion has already provoked an outcry on social media. Emily Jacir, a Palestinian artist who won the Biennale’s 2007 Golden Lion, wrote on Instagram, “Shame on Creative Australia who just cancelled him.”
The cancelation of Sabsabi’s pavilion is a dramatic turnabout for for Australia, whose Biennale presentation is likely to be closely watched because the country won the Golden Lion in 2024 for Archie Moore’s pavilion.
Sabsabi had not yet announced what he had planned for the 2026 Biennale, but he did say the pavilion would be “an inclusive place,” adding, “It’s a place to bring people together. I like to use the word ‘nurturing.’”
The news is the first sign that tensions over Israel’s war in Gaza will continue to infiltrate the 2026 Biennale. The 2024 edition faced widespread controversy over Israel’s pavilion, which was denounced by thousands of artists in advance of the show’s opening. The pavilion was ultimately closed by its representative, artist Ruth Patir, who said she would not open it until a hostage deal and a ceasefire agreement, neither of which were reached during the Biennale’s run.
Israel has not announced its plans for the 2026 Biennale, though nearly a dozen other nations have already done so.
