Panel Discussion: Who’s Afraid of Khaled Sabsabi?

In February 2025, artist Khaled Sabsabi was abruptly removed by Creative Australia as the 2026 representative to the Venice Biennale after media and political backlash over early works referencing the 9/11 terror attacks and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The decision was followed last week by the indefinite postponement by university management of an exhibition featuring his work, Stolon Press: Flat Earth, due to open in May 2025 at Monash University Museum of Art.

Both decisions were framed as consultative and in the interests of social harmony. They unfolded against a backdrop of mounting political pressure and an increasingly volatile international climate, with a very real rise in Islamophobia and antisemitism.

Yet these events form a flashpoint in an escalating crisis across cultural institutions, where the pressure to avoid controversy and to appease—whether external lobbying, internal governance, or public backlash—has led to a pattern of preemptive censorship and institutional retreat.

At stake are not only principles of anti-racism and free expression, but the institutional conditions that make such expression possible—education, interpretation, and the facilitation of complex, sometimes uncomfortable and perhaps even disharmonious, public discussion.

Convened by Memo

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Panellists

Louise Adler has had over thirty years of experience on a wide range of arts boards.

Anthony Gardner works at the University of Oxford in the UK, is the 2025 Dobell Chair in Art History at ANU in Kamberri/Canberra, and a member of the Panel of Industry Advisors for the Australian Pavilion selection, Venice Biennale 2026.

Ghassan Hage is a professor of anthropology and the author of The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism (2023).

Josh Milani is the director of Milani Gallery, representing artist Khaled Sabsabi.

Azza Zein is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose installations and research explore notions of dematerialisation, displacement, counter-geographies, and the invisibility of labour.

Moderated by Memo editors Helen Hughes and Paris Lettau.

Introduced by author and cultural theorist Nikos Papastergiadis, whose most recent books are The Cosmos in Cosmopolitanism (2023) and John Berger and Me (2024).

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