There is only one worthwhile test of social cohesion. We may have just failed it

The idea that an artwork should not be “divisive” is an extraordinary one, an anti-creative concept which, if you follow it to its natural conclusion, leads us inexorably to the end-point of propaganda.

And yet anxiety over possible divisiveness seems to have been the guiding emotional principle applied by the board of Creative Australia, the government’s main arts body, when it abruptly sacked Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi and his curator Michael Dagostino as Australia’s representatives at the prestigious Venice Biennale next year.

Curator Michael Dagostino (left) and artist Khaled Sabsabi have been reinstated after being dropped as Australia’s entry to Venice in 2026.Credit: Steven Siewert

The board, which this week reinstated the duo in a spectacular backflip, originally said it acted to avoid the erosion of public support for Australia’s artistic community that might ensue from a “prolonged and divisive debate”.

It is assumed that a prolonged and divisive debate about an artwork is a bad thing, but it doesn’t have to be.

To be fair, the board’s anxieties were well-founded.

It was February 2025 and a caravan full of explosives had been discovered in north-west Sydney. This incident was quickly labelled an anti-Jewish terror plot but was later revealed to be a “criminal con job”. The Peter Dutton-led Coalition was hammering the Albanese government (then behind in the polls) for being soft on antisemitism. Horrific pictures of burnt and maimed Gazan children aired on television nightly. Jewish-Australians were encountering antisemitism in their day-to-day lives. Pro-Palestine and pro-Israel forces were demonstrating on the streets and clashing in arts organisations.

Sabsabi, stridently pro-Palestine Lebanese-Australian, had made clear his view on Israel when he decided to boycott the 2022 Sydney Festival because it took $20,000 in funding from the Israeli Embassy. His boycott was well before the horror of the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas on innocent Israelis, a day of rape, torture, kidnapping and slaughter from which more and more horror has unspooled.

Sabsabi’s views on Israel were known when he was chosen, as was his body of work, which includes a video and sound installation called “YOU”, owned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. “YOU” features multiple versions of an image of Hassan Nasrallah, former head of Hezbollah.

A still from Sabsabi’s video installation YOU (2007), showing then-Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

It was created in 2007, and Hezbollah was listed by the Australian government as a proscribed organisation in 2021. The Australian, which was front and centre in the anti-Sabsabi campaign, called the use of Nasrallah’s image as “ambiguous” and “questionable”. Fancy an artwork being ambiguous or questionable!

In recent years, George Orwell has had many reasons to turn in his grave. But he surely would have rotated a full 360-degrees at such a description and all that lies under it.

I won’t mount a defence of the artwork here, not least because it would be patronising to the artist, but to interpret it as an endorsement of terrorism is quite the stretch.

Likewise, the other work from Sabsabi’s oeuvre that the News Corp media and certain Coalition politicians seemed magically to discover once Sabsabi was chosen for the Biennale. It is from 2006, and is called “Thank you very much”.

Another video installation, it features a scrambled cut of images of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers on September 11, followed by footage of George W. Bush saying “Thank you very much” (excerpted from a speech in which the president thanked the people of New York for their bravery during and after the attacks). The artwork has a rough-cut music-video quality to it, but has a sombre backing music which lends it a disturbing atmosphere.

It could be interpreted a thousand ways, not least as a critique on the ill-conceived and ultimately disastrous US-led invasion of Afghanistan that followed from the 9/11 terror attacks.

But, again, to interpret the work as a non-ironic glorification of terrorism is facile, not to mention self-serving on the part of the people who drew attention to it for political benefit.

Perhaps you could say that these parts of Sabsabi’s back catalogue were controversial, although the controversy seems to have been whipped up many years in retrospect, so it hardly seems organic to the work.

One of the mandated functions of Creative Australia (which replaced the old Australia Council) is “to uphold and promote freedom of expression in the arts”, but when it came to dumping Sabsabi, fear seems to have trumped freedom.

After the announcement of his selection, Sabsabi and his work became the target of a News Corp campaign, followed (as such campaigns so often are) by questions to the government in Senate question time.

Panic seems to have rolled downwards from Arts Minister Tony Burke to the Creative Australia board and the decision was made to sack Sabsabi.

As my colleague Linda Morris reported, Burke “insisted he did not demand Sabsabi’s head” and “the report found that the minister’s statement was consistent with the information received by the panel during its review”.

Creative Australia chief executive Adrian Collette later told Senate Estimates that it became clear to the board that “this entire process was going to be mired in the worst kind of divisive debate”.

He was probably right, but in deciding to dump Sabsabi, we got the divisive debate anyway, turbocharged with valid questions about political pressure, the power of the pro-Israel lobby, and what Orwell might have called the “thought policing” of criticisms of Israel by colliding them automatically with antisemitism.

If the idea that an artwork should stay clear of divisiveness is extraordinary, the idea that art about “divisive” topics should be avoided when those topics are in the news, and causing ructions in society, is even more so. And it should be utterly rejected.

Picasso didn’t wait until the Spanish Civil War was over before he finished Guernica. Its impact was due to its contemporaneity.

Politicians often discuss the importance of shoring up social cohesion, which, in Australia, has undoubtedly been tested by the ripple-effects of the Israel-Gaza conflict.

But the only worthwhile test of social cohesion is our ability to support freedom of expression and diversity of thought at the moment when it urgently matters.

Which is right now.

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.