Venice Biennale 2026
Acclaimed artist, Khaled Sabsabi, and curator, Michael Dagostino, are the artistic team for the Australia Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition will run from 9 May to 22 November 2026.
About the artist
Khaled Sabsabi is an acclaimed, award-winning Australian multidisciplinary artist whose work explores human collectiveness, the complexities of identity politics, and the impact of ideology through a continual transfer between the material and the philosophical. For over 35 years, he has worked across mediums and borders, collaborating with communities locally and internationally. Sabsabi’s work centres on social justice and lived experience informed by his migration from Lebanon in 1976 to escape the civil war.
Sabsabi sees art as an effective tool to communicate and converse with people, through a familiar language, creating immersive and engaging experiences. Khaled started out his artistic practice working in hip-hop, as a performer and as a youth worker, engaging with Arabic, Aboriginal, and Pacific Islander communities. As he established his artistic practice he also worked in detention centres, schools, prisons, refugee and settlements camps, hospitals and youth centres. This foundational means of community informed public service helped to establish social advocacy as the core of his process and practice and continues to impact his art making.
Sabsabi has been the recipient of more than fifteen international awards, including the Creative Australia ‘Annual Visual Arts Award’ 2023, International Council of Museums' and Heritage Awards, Video Art Prize 2016, and the Sharjah Art Programme Prize in 2016. He has produced more than 65 major mixed media and installation-based works to date, exhibiting in over 90 solo and group art exhibitions in Australia and internationally including 5th Marrakech Biennale, 18th Biennale of Sydney and the 21st Biennale of Sydney, 9th Shanghai Biennale, Sharjah Biennial 11, 1st Yinchuan Biennale, 3rd Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 2018 and 2024.
Sabsabi is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane.
About the curator
Michael Dagostino is the Director of the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney. As a relatively new museum, it unites the university’s diverse collections into a multidisciplinary institution dedicated to education, research and community engagement.
As the founding director of Parramatta Artists Studios, he established a key platform for emerging artists. In 2011, he became Director of Campbelltown Arts Centre, where he continued an artist-driven program supporting local, national, and international collaborations. Notable projects include With Secrecy and Despatch (2016), co-curated with Tess Allas and David Garneau, exploring colonial impacts through the Appin Massacre, and Another Day in Paradise (2017), showcasing Myuran Sukumaran’s work co-curated by Ben Quilty. Dagostino curated Lisa Reihana’s Cinemania (2018) and commissioned the Australian First Nations component of her In Pursuit of Venus [Infected] for the New Zealand Pavillion at the Venice Biennale (2017). A Hope and A Promise (2021), co-curated by Adam Porter and Matt Cox, surveyed Khaled Sabsabi’s 30-year practice held at the Art Gallery of NSW and Campbelltown Arts Centre.
Dagostino has received Imagine Awards and ICOM awards for institutional excellence. His board memberships include Sydney Dance Company, FBi Radio, Accessible Arts, Artspace and the Sydney Writers’ Festival, alongside advisory roles for the New South Wales Government. He remains committed to advancing museums' role in fostering access, equity and authorship.
