Like Sabsabi, my art was cancelled. Instead of outrage, there was barely a whimper

“Unprecedented!” “Uncharted territory!” Art world claims that Creative Australia’s cancelling of artist Khaled Sabsabi from the Venice Biennale came out of the blue suggest some very short, selective memories.

Creative Australia admitted just over a year ago, via public statement on their website, to cancelling and maligning another artist with no reasonable cause.

Performance artist Casey Jenkins.Credit: Wayne Taylor

That artist was me.

In 2020, Creative Australia (then known at the Australia Council for the Arts) rescinded a $25,000 grant for my solo performance artwork, Immaculate. The work, a meditation on stigma associated with solo and queer reproduction, live-streamed my process of trying to conceive by self-insemination each month.

The Creative Australia duo who spearheaded my cancellation are still in charge – chief executive Adrian Collette, who faces questioning at Senate estimates tonight, and executive director of arts investment Alice Nash.

As in Sabsabi’s case, my work was cancelled following conservative media stirring up outrage and politicians expressing concern. There was an informative article about the work in this masthead, followed shortly after by an outraged segment from Sky News host Peta Credlin, concern expressed by then arts minister Paul Fletcher and a hyperbolic petition begging my funders to, “please, think of the children!”

Artist Khaled Sabsabi.Credit: James Brickwood

The volume of resistance to the works was not, however, unusual or excessive for an artist of marginalised experience creating work for a mainstream platform. I’ve experienced far greater pushback to previous works. Nonetheless, Colette and Nash appeared very concerned, for themselves, and abruptly broke our contract.

I took Creative Australia to the Human Rights Commission and shortly after was offered a six-figure sum, far more than the original grant they had rescinded, to settle before the case went to court. Instead, I progressed the discrimination and defamation case to the Federal Court and fought for three years for public accountability. I didn’t want other artists to go through what I had.

In the end, Creative Australia settled the case for the six-figure sum and a public apology and training.

The apology I finally accepted was comprehensive. In it Creative Australia acknowledge not only that they cancelled my artwork with no cause, but that they misrepresented it, falsely insinuated I was engaged in illegal activity, shared a personal document without consent, and not only discussed my project with third parties (which they swear they never do) but instructed another organisation to remove support for me and blacklisted me, managing an unrelated work of mine unfairly.

When the apology was published, I thought the art world would be incensed. I thought they’d demand change. There was barely a whimper. Not a single arts organisation in Australia, to my knowledge, so much as shared Creative Australia’s apology on social media. Not that Creative Australia didn’t feature heavily across socials at that time. The big four-year funding grants had just been announced and there were countless posts thanking them for the cash.

Institutional betrayal is a particularly pernicious trauma. It creates a constant feeling of precarity and messes with your ability to trust authority figures. That anxiety will be seeping out now into Muslim and immigrant communities of which Sabsabi is a part, just as queer and solo parents felt the burden of increased stigma after Creative Australia maligned my work.

I’m dismayed to think Sabsabi could have avoided this ordeal had arts organisations stood up against Creative Australia back then. Instead, the organisation and leadership experienced no community backlash, despite publicly admitting to extensive misconduct.

In rescinding support for Sabsabi, Creative Australia cited, as they did for me, nebulous future “risk”. It was qualified as “unacceptable” in Sabsabi’s case and “incalculable” in mine. Creative Australia’s own “audit and risk committee” is tasked with, “identifying and managing (Creative Australia’s) highest risks, including those associated with individual projects”. How many other artists have been quietly dismissed behind the scenes for reasons of political risk and fear?

Personally, I find Sabsabi’s work generous and gracious. Thank You Very Much (Sabsabi’s 2006 video montage of planes hitting the Twin Towers that reportedly precipitated Creative Australia’s decision) takes its title from the words of George W. Bush, shown in the final clip. Far from promoting terrorism, the title and the revelation of Bush as its source gently acknowledges and pushes back against community anxieties that the artist, as a Muslim man, would support terrorists.

To me, the work is clearly a repudiation of terrorism as a senselessly violent action welcomed by its political target. Some may disagree and that’s OK. His work doesn’t constitute hate speech; if it did he’d be charged. But those who find his art challenging should be shouting the loudest to defend his right to make it. Freedom of artistic expression isn’t something you can bestow selectively.

Now the art world appears to have found its voice, I hope it continues to use it. The positions of Collette and Nash are untenable. No one should be assuaged by Creative Australia’s announcement of an “independent review”. This will do nothing but delay and distract. Colette, Nash must stand down.

But even more important than an immediate overhaul of Creative Australia’s executive, committees and policies, however, is a sector-wide reckoning. All arts organisations in Australia need to consider deeply how they have let Creative Australia get to this point and why they are only standing up now.

If you’re only willing to speak out against censorship when it targets expressions that resonate with you or are politically convenient, the problem lies with you.

Casey Jenkins is a Melbourne-based installation and performance artist.