OPENING EVENT // Saturday 14 September 2-5pm
ARTIST TALK // Commencing with an Artist Talk between Khaled Sabsabi & Artist Profile Editor Kon Gouriotis 2-3pm.

Presented for the first time at The Lock-Up, this is the most significant exhibition to date for Lebanese Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi. Featuring a selection of works produced over a nearly twenty-year period, including never-before-seen works by the nationally and internationally renowned artist.

In late 1976, following the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon (1975-1990) Sabsabi migrated to Australia with his family, settling in Western Sydney where he still lives and works today. The artist works across multiple mediums and his art deals with concepts of nationhood, identity and change. Since the late 1980s, he has worked with communities on arts projects that explore place, displacement, marginalisation, and ideological differences associated with the human condition.

All of Sabsabi’s works presented at The Lock-Up resonate together as a conversation and panorama of the artist’s practice, which is heavily informed both by his biography and by his interest in tasawwuf spirituality, more widely known as Sufism, a practice within Islam. In this moment of renewed global shifts towards intolerance, these artworks convey a complex landscape of history and personal experiences that expresses the apprehensions of an increasingly uncertain world but one which, for the artist, still holds possibilities of collective transcendence.

ABOUT KHALED SABSABI

This exhibition, titled Khaled Sabsabi, offers the artist’s perspective on the world. It is informed by tasawwuf, more widely known as Sufism, a practice within Islam where the ordinary presents opportunities for moments of heightened spirituality, and where the individual coalesces with the collective in a symbiotic relationship.

Born in Tripoli, Lebanon, and having migrated with his family to Australia in late 1976 to flee the civil war, as a teenager Sabsabi became interested in music and film. The artist frequently thinks back to those days listening to Prince and funk music, to Eric B & Rakim and Public Enemy, when he began to make his own music and perform on Sydney’s and Newcastle’s Hip Hop scenes in the late ’80s and ’90s. Sabsabi subsequently made the move to visual art but still incorporated music and film in his work. After 2001, he went through a period of self-reflection, embarking on a series of visits to his birthplace and surrounding countries. These journeys have inspired him to make work about the connection between spiritual belief, culture and politics.

‘This exhibition presents works made over the last 18 years. It is a personal map of sorts that traces the complex relationship between the self and other, belief, devotion and the possibilities for transcendence. Join me on this journey‘ — Khaled Sabsabi, 2024

Learn more about Khaled Sabsabi here