Creative Australia head Adrian Collette won’t resign over dumping of Venice Biennale artist Khaled Sabsabi

Creative Australia CEO Adrian Collette has told parliament he won’t resign over the dumping of artist Khaled Sabsabi as Australia’s representative to the Venice Biennale, insisting the decision was necessary.

Creative Australia CEO Adrian Collette. Picture: Britta Campion

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Creative Australia CEO Adrian Collette has told parliament he won’t resign over the dumping of artist Khaled Sabsabi as Australia’s representative to the Venice Biennale, insisting the decision was necessary despite the extraordinary upheaval it’s caused across the artistic community.

During a tense Senate Estimates hearing on Tuesday night, Mr Collette revealed it was Sabsabi’s depiction of the 9/11 plane hijackings that ultimately cost the artist his Venice selection – not an alternative work from 2007 that prominently featured terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah.

The images of the 2001 terrorist attacks in Sabsabi’s art were almost immediately deemed to be a “significant risk” to the organisation and its future mission, Mr Collette said.

“My concern here was for the future of the organisation. In these circumstances, the board was compelled to exercise its judgment and there were no dissenting voices.”

Recounting the events leading up to the controversy, Mr Collette said he wasn’t aware of the 9/11 artwork when Sabsabi was selected to represent Australia in January. This was because searches of artist back-catalogues are not typically conducted and had not been carried out in previous years.

Instead, he first became aware of the work, titled Thank You Very Much, when questions were raised by Liberal senator Claire Chandler in parliament, and when a subsequent phone call was received from Arts Minister Tony Burke expressing shock over the matter.

“We were unaware because we do not do a thorough search of artists’ back catalogues,” he said.

“There wasn’t a thorough search of 30 years of artistic enterprise, thousands of images, before we made the decision to appoint Khaled (Sabsabi) and Michael (Dagostino).”

Whether that decision was right or wrong will now be the subject of an independent review, he said.

Artist Khaled Sabsabi.

“The organisation was exposed, (we) don’t deny that. It’s a process that’s served us very well over a number of years – but we’re not pretending there’s something to learn through the process.”

Mr Collette called an urgent board meeting in the hours after hearing from Mr Burke, a meeting at which directors voted unanimously to rescind the appointments of Sabsabi and Dagostino. A fateful decision, it caused at least one board member to resign from Creative Australia and other staff members to quit in protest.

Asked whether he would consider his own position, Mr Collette said: “I work day in and day out for the welfare of this organisation – if it’s in someone else’s gift to say, ‘We think you should move on’, well, so be it, but it certainly won’t be something I would do.”

Mr Collette said a brief was provided to Mr Burke on January 31 confirming the appointments of Sabsabi and Dagostino, but this information pack did not contain any information about past works.

The only wrinkle mentioned to the minister was that Sabsabi was on record as having boycotted the Sydney Festival in 2022 (with others) over the organiser’s decision to accept $20,000 in funding from the Israeli embassy. The funding was accepted in order to stage a work by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin.

Mr Collette said he had already been aware of Sabsabi’s 2007 piece featuring Hassan Nasrallah. But unlike the 9/11 piece, the Nasrallah work was not as concerning, Mr Collette said, because it had been on display at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art for “well over a decade”.

“I don’t doubt it’s a controversial piece … it’s been viewed by thousands and thousands and thousands of people,” he said. The board considered the 9/11 video, by contrast, as not so simple to explain and contextualise amid the “relentless daily threats to social cohesion”.

“The impact of art does not reside with an artist’s intent – it resides in the way it’s perceived by the public. Those images, with that caption, with the US president – no one would have the time to critique the intent of that work. That would have a major impact on the public,” Mr Collette said.

Creative Australia chair Robert Morgan, who told the hearing he, too, would not be resigning, said the 9/11 imagery was regarded as “an untenable risk to the organisation” and had to be addressed at the time as a matter of urgency.

“It’s a bit like the tide going out for a tidal wave,” Mr Morgan said. “If you stand and wait you get overtaken. And we took the view that to do nothing would risk that. The board recognised this piece of video was a major, a major change that we had to address.”