Social cohesion v. artistic freedom

Was Creative Australia's decision to withdraw Khaled Sabsabi from the Venice Biennale the right move?

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Last week, Creative Australia withdrew its support for artist Khaled Sabsabi to represent Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale. The decision was taken after Opposition arts spokesperson Claire Chandler drew attention to two works created by Sabsabi in 2007.

In this piece I want to dig deep on the two ethical claims that came into conflict in this case - artistic freedom and social cohesion. My contention is that while artistic freedom would usually win the day, the risk to Australia’s democracy at this unique moment in time makes the decision to bench Sabsabi defensible.

Background

Sabsabi was born in Tripoli and migrated with his family to Australia in 1978 following the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon. The Lebanese family settled in Western Sydney where Sabsabi continues to live and work.

One of his pieces that have drawn negative attention features Hassan Nasralla, the now deceased leader of Hezbollah that Australia currently - though not back in 2007 when the work was created - lists as a terror organisation. The second, Thank you very much, created in 2006, features images of the destruction of the twin towers on 9/11.

When the controversy sparked off in Parliament this week, the Minister of Home Affairs and the Arts Tony Burke picked up the phone to the CEO of Creative Australia, Adrian Collette, who convened an emergency board meeting.

At it, the board reversed support for the two artists because while Creative Australia is, “an advocate for freedom of artistic expression,” it now feared that its choice for Venice posed “an unacceptable risk to public support for Australia's artistic community and could undermine our goal of bringing Australians together through art and creativity."

In the wake of the decision, one board member and numerous staff resigned in protest. Others in the wider artistic community expressed outrage. At an impromptu protest held in Sydney poet Omar Sakr said:

“When art must serve the government’s political agenda, it’s no longer art, it’s propaganda,,,We’re being told that it’s not just permissible, but necessary to cancel artists if they or their work might be considered disruptive or upsetting to a portion of the public or media.”

Sakr’s strong feelings came from personal experience. He had been one of three writers whose teen writing workshops were cancelled by the Victorian State Library last March, citing “child and cultural safety concerns”. All three had previously publicly expressed support for the Palestinian cause.

Other artists have raised similar concerns. In a letter addressed to the board of Creative Australia, those shortlisted for the prize but who missed out called for Sabsabi and Dagostino to be reinstated. “We believe that revoking support for the current Australian artist and curator representatives for Venice Biennale 2026 is antithetical to the goodwill and hard-fought artistic independence, freedom of speech and moral courage that is at the core of arts in Australia, which plays a crucial role in our thriving and democratic nation,” they wrote.

The issues

In an ideal world, I would agree that Creative Australia has done the wrong thing. Creative Australia is funded by the government to “uphold and promote freedom of expression in the arts and to support Australian arts practice that reflects the diversity of Australia.” If the process by which the two creators were chosen to compete was rigorous and fair (and no is suggesting it’s not) it’s procedurally unfair to overturn it.

More than that, to do so for political reasons is a threat to artistic freedom, which itself is important because it goes to the very purpose of artistic productions, which is to start conversations that otherwise might never happen, and say things during them that may otherwise not be said. The role of creatives is to exercise precisely the freedom of thought and expression that democratic societies were designed to value and defend.

But we don’t live in an ideal Australia. Instead, we live in one in which the community is dangerously polarised. Because of this, the conflict here is not the usual one of artistic freedom versus political expediency.

Instead, something more than Labor’s electoral aspirations are at stake in this conflict. Namely, the social cohesion of the Australian community and the collective duty of all Australians, including artists, to bring the temperature down if we want our democracy to resist the worldwide trend towards illiberal democracy and autocratic regimes and both survive and thrive.

He who pays the piper calls the tune

Patrons of the arts have always sought, and achieved some degree of control, over the artists they bankroll. While in theory for grant providers like Creative Australia, this power is exerted over artists through the decisions of their peers, the reality is that organisations like Creative Australia are funded by the government and consequently feel the heat from that funder from time to time. Remember the Morrison government’s interference in sports and academic grants? Labor has its own history of interfering with the independent system of allocating sports grants, too.

He who pays the piper calls the tune, and while artists (and academics) have good reasons for not wanting promised independence from government to be compromised, history shows that this is an ever-present risk from governments of all stripes that only financially independent creators and thinkers are guaranteed to avoid.

This is particularly the case now, when elections are afoot. Why? Because voting time is when the public have a chance to weigh in on government decisions about how their tax-dollars are spent, including the money spent funding artists, and if they don’t agree with those funding decisions, to seek accountability.

Artistic freedom and social cohesion

The most fascinating aspect of the Biennale episode is the dual role played by Tony Bourke. Bourke is the Minister for Arts and for Home Affairs, the agency that under his predecessor, Clare O’Neil, released the Strengthening Australian Democracy report. The report is dedicated to documenting the fragmenting of social cohesion in Australia and the risks such social polarisation poses to the stability of this country’s political and social system.

The document offers suggestions to political, business and community leaders - as well as individual decisions - on ways we can and must turn the temperature down to avoid the kind of democratic collapse currently happening in real time in the United States. Suggestions we know Bourke takes seriously because of decisions he’s made in recent months to deny a visa to an Israeli politician on the grounds that her demeaning views of Palestinians would undermine social cohesion, and his support of the government’s decision to appoint an antisemitism and an Islamophobia envoy to turn down the temperature of the rhetoric and related violence, particularly against “soft” Jewish targets, like schools, synagogues and childcare centres.

As Arts Minister, Bourke was the target of the highly partial nature of the artistic community’s response to October 7th.

Even in the earliest moments of reporting on the Al Qaeda-type slaughter of children as young as 9 months, the kidnapping of young women by men who ominously commented on their beauty as they were led away, and the brutal murders and sexual mutilation of women dragged from cars or gang raped at a rock concert, Australia’s artistic community was busily collecting signatures on a petition addressed to him that appeared in Overland on October 21, a mere two weeks after the Hamas-led invasion and kidnappings on October 7th.

A petition that Overland’s editors were forced to admit weeks later in a snarling “apology”, doubted the truth of victim, eye-witness and media reporting of atrocities perpetrated against Israeli civilians, and expressed no condemnation of the atrocities. Instead two paragraphs were dedicated to the undemocratic defense and justification of violence against Israeli civilians as the inevitable and understandable response to Israel’s existence.

One of those signatories was Khaled Sabsabi.

This means that when the Sabsabi case came to Bourke’s attention, he had the knowledge and responsibility to evaluate it with his home affairs, arts and multicultural ministerial hats on. While he told news organisations that his call to Creative Australia’s CEO was placed solely to offer support for whatever decision the board made, the Minister would almost certainly have hoped that the resolution chosen would put downward pressure on anti-semitic sentiments and violence. Particularly in the context of last month’s crime spree against Jewish targets that remains unsolved, public concern about the two Bankstown nurses who recently threatened violence against Jewish patients and the Opposition Leader’s success in making the government’s approach to anti-semitism a live issue in the upcoming federal election.

The resolution and its ethicality

Is this what removing Sabsabi from the prestigious role of representing Australia abroad achieves?

That is unclear. Certainly, an artist of Lebanese descent was publicly humiliated so that the Minister - and the Labor government - could give the appearance of standing against antisemitism or, at least, deny the Opposition Leader and The Australian another club with which to beat it.

Which it would have done in ways that may well have been persuasive to voters. It is an unusual though perhaps positive aspect of this controversy that conservative forces are leading an effort to make a firm stance against antisemitism part of the basket of values that define western liberalism.

Further, it may have seemed hypocritical to voters that at the same time the Labor government was chastising citizens to bring the temperature down, it was showcasing an Australian to the world who arguably was doing the precise opposite of that through his political actions and/or his creative work.

Where does this leave artistic freedom? Arguably in these polarised times on the same shaky ground currently inhabited by other important democratic ideals like impartiality and civility.

To return that ground to something more solid, the advice in the Strengthening Australian Democracy is sound. Australia must depolarise, meaning each and every one of us must take responsibility for thinking, feeling and acting differently to how we’ve been thinking, feeling and acting before.

This includes Palestinian and Israelis/Jews living here, who need to be brave enough to abandon the toxic models of relating we see modelled overseas and innovative enough to negotiate a new relationship of mutual compassion and allyship in this new land we all call home.

It also includes the artistic community, which would do well to think critically about its decision to justify and excuse violence against citizens by any state or armed group to achieve political ends because doing this is frighteningly undemocratic. What all participants in democratic forms of government are agreeing to is that they will resolve disputes and urge others to resolve their disputes peacefully. That is, through political action, not physical force.

This is not to say the artistic community cannot play a role in the conversation. Rather it is to suggest that this role should expend the community’s credibility wisely by throwing light on complex social and political questions, not ever more polarising heat.