Australia Removed Him. Now Khaled Sabsabi Is at the Venice Biennale Twice
At the Biennale, spirituality is risky material. It can turn into atmosphere, into style, even into an alibi. Khaled Sabsabi (Tripoli, Lebanon, 1965) avoids that danger by taking a more complex path. conference of one’s self, the project conceived for the Australia Pavilion, does not use migration, devotion and multiculturalism as themes to display. It holds them in tension inside a space that slows down, holds back and subtracts. More than explaining something, the work tries to change how one looks and listens.
Between Sufism, migration, listening and plural identities, the Australian artist imagines the Australia Pavilion as a place of contemplation and transformation. The project offers no easy answers. It tries to alter the quality of attention of those who enter.
Italian version: read the interview published by Artribune.
The work reaches the Venice Biennale after the case that engulfed Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino in 2025. In February, Creative Australia, the government body that oversees the arts, withdrew their appointment after media and political pressure. The dispute centred on You, a 2007 installation that included ambiguous images of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah is designated as a terrorist organisation by several countries. In July, Sabsabi and Dagostino were reinstated. Creative Australia later confirmed the history of the withdrawal and reinstatement.
Who Is Khaled Sabsabi at the Australia Pavilion?
Born in Lebanon and raised in Australia, Sabsabi has for years developed a practice in which image, sound, memory and collective experience are never separated from the histories that pass through them. In Venice, this trajectory takes on a particularly precise form.
The reference to The Conference of the Birds by Farid al-Din Attar is not ornamental. It is the project’s internal matrix: a poetic and spiritual structure that links interiority and diaspora, individual experience and the movement of peoples, plural belongings and the search for a possible centre.
In a Biennale marked by visual and verbal overload, Sabsabi attempts something rarer: not to occupy space, but to transform the way it is inhabited.
Interview with Khaled Sabsabi
The title conference of one’s self suggests both an inner gathering and a shared space of reflection. How did it come about?
The title comes from The Conference of the Birds, the twelfth-century Sufi poem by Farid al-Din Attar. In that text there is a difficult pilgrimage that leads to a decisive discovery: the divine that the seekers were pursuing was already inside them. I was interested in bringing this intuition into a contemporary and multisensory dimension, capable of resonating with the global history of migration. Both Australia and Venice are places defined by water and by the coexistence of different cultures. The project also begins from here, from the attempt to place Australia’s multicultural and multireligious identity within a much broader history of crossings, exchanges, and mixtures. It is an invitation to recognize that local stories are never isolated.
Spirituality, migration, and shared humanity are three strong axes of the project. How do they manage to stay together without becoming illustrative?
I did not want to represent migration or faith or a generic idea of shared humanity in a direct way. I was interested instead in creating a space of reflection and abstraction in which these dimensions could enter into dialogue without being locked into a single meaning. The work leaves the public on a threshold, in an intermediate zone, where different cultural visions of the world can coexist. These are perspectives often marked by shared histories, but also by tensions and conflicts. The emotional dimension arises precisely there, at the point where collective humanity is not simply observed, but felt.
The title also recalls a Sufi tradition of inner transformation. In what way does this poetic and philosophical structure enter the visual and spatial language of the work?
Tasawwuf, that is, Sufism, is tied to the purification of the heart and to a search for deep sincerity. In Attar’s poem the birds face an arduous path and discover that what they are seeking is already inside them. I translated this journey in both a symbolic and a concrete way. On the one hand, the work questions the possibility of crossing ideological differences toward a shared spiritual center. On the other hand, while the poem speaks of seven levels of the self, I propose an eighth. For me, the number eight suggests a possible completeness, but also learning and unlearning. This idea takes shape in eight paintings that build a rhythm in space and accompany the visitor through the exhibition.
Your practice has long moved among image, sound, memory, devotion, and collective experience. What was urgent to bring to Venice today?
In a frenetic context like that of the Biennale, I felt the need to create a pause, a place of rest. By combining video, painting, and sound, I wanted to give form to a different temporality, slower, more intimate, but also open. I am interested in the pavilion being able to offer a moment of calm and shared contemplation. In that suspension, the boundaries between the individual and the collective begin to soften, and a form of commonality can emerge that today seems to me increasingly necessary.
Michael Dagostino has spoken of a long-standing creative dialogue with your work. What made this collaboration possible?
Michael and I share a story, also in biographical terms. We both come from migratory experiences and have lived almost all of our lives in Western Sydney, one of the most culturally diversified areas of Australia. We have been in dialogue, as friends and as collaborators, since the late 1990s, and this pavilion is the continuation of that conversation. Our relationship allowed us to push further the question of how to build a truly inclusive space for dialogue. Precisely because there was already a reciprocal understanding of the complexities of identity, it was possible to work not on a simply national statement, but on a more universal offering.
The 2026 edition of the Biennale is titled In Minor Keys. Do you see a resonance between your project and the sensibility of the international exhibition?
This year I am presenting my work both in the international exhibition and at the Australia Pavilion, and I consider these two works distinct but complementary. I think of them both within the same spiritual framework of identity: khalil concerns more the inner self, while conference of one’s self concerns the outer self. Both come close to the sensibility of In Minor Keys because they question how vast and unbounded identity can be. I was deeply struck by the curatorial vision left by Koyo Kouoh before her passing, above all the idea that humanity must exercise the art of true listening. This Biennale seems to ask precisely this: a descent toward what is subtle, personal, not shouted.
What do you hope remains with visitors after the encounter with the Australian Pavilion?
I hope they leave feeling a little closer to their own truth. And I also hope they can accept that questions, at times, are more fertile than answers. If the work manages to open a reflection on how individual stories intertwine with global diasporic realities, then it will have done its job. For me, the point is always this: to push a little further the limit through which we perceive ourselves and others.
Khaled Sabsabi: conference of one’s self
Khaled Sabsabi: conference of one’s self
Australia Pavilion
Giardini della Biennale, Venice
9 May–22 November 2026
