Venice Biennale backflip could turn pride into embarrassment

Australia triumphed last year at the world’s most high-profile art event, the Venice Biennale. Australia’s entrant, Queensland artist Archie Moore, became the first Australian to win the coveted Golden Lion award for best national participation. The honour guarantees next year’s entry will be highly anticipated and scrutinised by the international art world.

What an embarrassment, then, if, as seems highly possible, next year’s Australian pavilion stands empty, or is filled by an exhibition that lacks legitimacy in the eyes of large swaths of the Australian arts community.

Artist Khaled Sabsabi (right) with curator Michael Dagostino.Credit: Steven Siewert

This unfortunate prospect comes about as a result of an opaque process to pick Australia’s biennale entry, overseen by the board of Creative Australia, the federal government’s arts funding body, and an even more murky decision to dump the artistic team chosen: Sydney multimedia artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino.

A group of independent industry experts selected the pair. The board signed off on the decision and unveiled it this month. The announcement was made in Granville, where Sabsabi’s Lebanese-Australian background and deep western Sydney connections were celebrated. Sabsabi told the Herald the pavilion’s exhibition under his stewardship would be “an inclusive place”.

By Wednesday, the celebrations were well and truly over. The Australian newspaper ran a story highlighting a 2007 Sabsabi video installation featuring Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, a declared terrorist organisation. The Coalition raised the matter in Parliament and queried a second work: a 2006 video splicing footage of the September 11 Twin Tower attacks with that of president George W. Bush called Thank You Very Much.

Arts Minister Tony Burke phoned Creative Australia. On Thursday night, its board called a snap meeting and a unanimous decision to rescind the invitation to Sabsabi and Dagostino was taken. Neither was given the opportunity to address the board’s concerns. A flurry of resignations has followed, and other artists have indicated they are likely to boycott any attempt to find an Australian replacement for Venice.

Burke has denied directing Creative Australia to withdraw the invitation, but serious questions remain about his involvement.

Equally, hard questions remain about the due diligence done by Creative Australia’s selection panel and its board. Were they aware of these earlier works by Sabsabi? If so, did they give some consideration to whether, at this time of heightened and divisive emotions around events in the Middle East, this was the moment to choose these artists to represent Australia?

The Herald can name few subjects it would like to see less on display than the now-deceased Nasrallah, whose malign influence was a disaster for the Middle East and a source of constant threat to Israel and its citizens. But the works in question, undertaken more than a decade ago, were not the works to be shown at the biennale. The pieces are difficult and their interpretation debatable but, in any case, at stake is an argument about the right of an artist to reflect on the world around them free from censorship. Once Creative Australia had made its pick, a defence of open society, so under challenge worldwide, required it to back its artists, not to cave at the first hint of controversy.

If, as collector and patron Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo once told The Art Newspaper, “Venice is the mirror of the art world, artistically and geopolitically”, what message will an empty Australian pavilion send about the state of art and artistic freedom in this post-October 7, Trump 2.0 world?

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