After dropping and then reinstating Khaled Sabsabi as Australia’s Venice Biennale representative, Creative Australia has awarded the artist a $100,000 grant, the Guardian reports.
Sabsabi is one of 16 awardees under Creative Australia’s Visual Arts, Craft and Design Framework. His grant will support a solo show at the Samstag Museum of Art in Adelaide in 2027. According to the Guardian, that exhibition will also feature new work set to debut at the Biennale’s Australia Pavilion next year.
The Lebanese Australian artist was controversially dropped as Australia’s Biennale pick in February after some raised concerns about past works by him, including one that depicts Hassan Nasrallah, formerly the leader of Hezbollah. An article in the Australian also claimed that Sabsabi “favored boycotts of Israel.”
Creative Australia, which facilitates the nation’s Biennale pavilion, said at the time that work and others by Sabsabi pose “an unacceptable risk to public support for Australia’s artistic community.” Sabsabi and his curator, Michael Dagostino, said they were being censored.
Many in Australia denounced the decision and called for a reevaluation of the practices of Creative Australia. Senior leaders at the organization departed amid the controversy. Meanwhile, Monash University said in March that it had “indefinitely postponed” a planned exhibition by Sabsabi. (Less than two months later, the school decided to move forward with the show.)
Then, in July, roughly five months after Sabsabi was dropped from the pavilion, Creative Australia announced that the artist and Dagostino would be reinstated. Sabsabi and Dagostino said the reinstatement offered “a sense of resolution” after “significant personal and collective hardship.”
