_{Cover image: Khaled Sabsabi in his studio. Image by Anna Kucera.}

Khaled Sabsabi has only made a single work rooted in his childhood memory of growing up during the Lebanese Civil War.

That experience, however, was so traumatic, and the piece is so powerful – raw, rooted in memory, immersive – that it resonates across Sabsabi’s entire career.

First presented in 1998 at the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre in Western Sydney and recreated for his Vessel Contemporary show Between Suns, Aajyna (which translates as “dough”) conjures up the spaces in which the teenage Khaled and his family hid as the hostilities raged all around them.

“Every now and then somebody would open a door and light would stream in and we could see where we were,” recalls the 61-year-old artist, whose family were fortunate enough to escape the war and relocate to Sydney’s West, where he still lives and works.

“In those moments I could see the water dripping down and making dark stains on the walls. To me those dark streaks looked like coffee,” remembers Sabsabi.

“But it was not just the stains on the walls that have stuck in my memory,” Sabsabi continues. “It was the smells – the stench of mould. And it was the smell of the bread that was cooked by my family. It was all we had to eat while we hid. So the sense memory is as powerful as the visual.”

To recreate the dark drip stains on the walls of an enclosed space in Vessel Contemporary, which is located in The Naval Store in Fremantle, Sabsabi used coffee, which a fellow journalist on the exhibition walk-through suggested was evoked by rows of upturned speakers emitting a low-frequency rumble that channelled the war outside. “They are coffee burners, aren’t they?” my colleague asked the artist.

Sabsabi shrugged and refused to commit. “If that is what you see in the work, so be it. It is not for me to interpret the work. It is there to spark reflection and a conversation,” he says.

When I press Sabsabi for details on this wrenching childhood memory, he pushes back – “It is still very painful for me” – but eventually dives back into this darkest of places.

“One day we were crossing the street and I could feel the sniper bullets in front of my eyes and in the back of my head,” remembers  Sabsabi.

“I couldn’t feel my feet any more. I couldn’t stand up. I was stuck in the middle. All I could do was scream. Fortunately, an adult picked me up and took me to a shelter,” says Sabsabi, struggling with every word and then cutting off abruptly.

This holding something back and reluctance to fully explain both his life experiences and his work goes to the essence of Sabsabi, both man and artist.

“If you over-prescribe and over-describe you leave no room for the imagination to flow. That is the beauty of art. If art doesn’t open those possibilities for us to engage and bring our own selves to the work – our own intellect, our own feelings, our own way of being – then it becomes something else. A documentary.”

In the three decades since he expanded his practice from hip-hop to the visual arts – Aajyna was his first piece for a gallery – Sabsabi has created a vast body of work using a range of mediums that have brought him national and international recognition.

Sabsabi’s art-world fame exploded into the broader public consciousness when his selection to represent Australia at this year’s Venice Biennale was revoked after The Australian newspaper unearthed references to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and the September 11 attacks in works from 2006 and 2007.

There was so much anger within the arts community about the withdrawal of Sabsabi’s invitation to show in the Australian Pavilion that Creative Australia was forced to reinstate the initial invitation, with acting chair Wesley Enoch apologising to the artist for the “hurt and pain” caused by the rescindment.

The controversy wounded Sabsabi so badly – he said at the time the controversy had “dismantled” his career and impacted on artists wanting to make political work – it is little surprise that his first post-Venice exhibition would be focused on the spiritual side of his work. (Sabsabi was also reluctant to talk about his Creative Australia controversy.)

“During the conversations I had with Mikala Tai, who curated this show, and the people from Vessel we decided we wanted to create an experience for the viewer,” explains Sabsabi as he walks me through the exhibition.

“They don’t have to understand what they are looking at and listening to. It is about feeling. And that feeling is created by your history as a member of the audience meeting that work created out of my history,” continues Sabsabi.

“Humanity has always relied on each other to survive. If it wasn’t for the exchange of ideas across histories, across cultures, across languages, faiths and beliefs, we wouldn’t have what we have today,” he says.

For Sabsabi, the universal is expressed through the spiritual, which for him means Sufism, a strand of Islam that is focused on mystical experience.

His spiritual beliefs are overtly represented in the exhibition by Sanjak (2012), a sacred ceremonial banner used by a number of Muslim communities as an object of devotion and often carried aloft in processions through villages and towns.

The piece was created in 2002, during the time Sabsabi returned to Lebanon to reconnect with his family and his history, and coincides with the spiritual journey that suffuses all his work. (He became a custodian of the sanjak in 2012.)

“The sanjak contains the 99 attributes of the divine and all of the teachers that have come from this particular school in Lebanon. It is included in the exhibition as an acknowledgment of the concept of faith that is embedded in my practices and faith as a part of everyday life,” explains Sabsabi.

While the works in Between Suns spring from Sabsabi’s Sufi practice and “reach towards the unseen”, as Mikala Tai argues in her program notes, he uses the most grounded of means: Arabic coffee.

“The aroma and the texture of coffee is part of my being. I used it in my first work, Aajyna, and I have continued to use coffee throughout my career. It’s not just material. The process of preparing the coffee to use connects me to my heritage, my culture. The aroma, the texture of the grounds, the colour, which almost has a redness to it.”

While Sabsabi is now regarded as one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists, he still lives and works in Western Sydney, Australia’s multicultural heartland, converting a suburban garage into a studio where he somehow manages to create large-scale works that are on show in his second Perth exhibition. (His first-ever solo show was at PICA in 2018.)

“He has long been a major figure in Western Sydney,” says Between Suns curator Tai. “He has mentored and encouraged other artists in his community, and still does,” Tai explains to me.

“He has urged artists in Western Sydney to retain their own voices and not compromise even though there can be pressure to conform to some kind of model in order to be successful. And he has shown you can have global success without coming via the Sydney CBD.”

Sabsabi says that no matter how much success he enjoys on the world stage, he won’t be abandoning Western Sydney, which he says still nourishes him.

“It’s my community,” says Sabsabi. “It’s what grounds me and my work.”

Between Suns is on at Vessel Contemporary until September 20. Opening hours are Wednesdays 1–7pm and Thursday to Sunday 11am–5pm. Vessel Contemporary is located in The Naval Store, 141 Queen Victoria Street, Fremantle.