Speaking from overseas just hours after the breaking news that Creative Australia’s Board had reinstated artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino as Australia’s representatives to the 2026 Venice Biennale, artist Lindy Lee offered candid details about her experience of the February 2025 Board meeting that spurred the debacle.
In the ABC Radio interview aired last night, Lee admitted to feeling “hemmed in” during the hastily arranged Board meeting that had been called in response to Senator Claire Chandler’s concerns about Sabsabi’s Venice Biennale appointment raised in Federal Parliament earlier that day.
Lee told the ABC, “The sense I had was that we were being hemmed in by press and by government.
“I think we bowed under pressure, and the pressure was mostly from press,” she added.
Lee also revealed that a point of concern for Board members during that meeting was their knowledge that ‘the press’ were planning to further vilify Sabsabi in the coming days and weeks.
“The press was about to mount this vilification against Khaled,” she said. “From what I understand it was going to be devastating and [it would] actually cripple the [Venice Biennale] project that Khaled had put forward. So that was actually what the Board was reacting to mostly.”
Lee also expressed her mixed feelings during and after the meeting – feelings that ultimately motivated her to resign from Creative Australia’s Board the following day.
“[The decision] wasn’t about the quality of Khaled’s work,” Lee said.
“It was more about bowing down to these external pressures, which, ultimately, I kind of understood in that meeting, but when I walked away, I just felt really that this was not the right thing to do, because you don’t bow under pressure.”
When asked why she thought Creative Australia had changed its decision now, after so much debate around Sabsabi’s 2006 work Thank You Very Much, Lee said she thought “there was a misunderstanding about that work in the beginning, and that’s what the Board didn’t get to talk about”.
She added, “We were bowing under pressure about the perceived meaning of that work.”
Describing the work Thank You Very Much, Lee said she thought, “It wasn’t about the support of any kind of terrorism or anything like that.
“But because of [Sabsabi’s] background and because of what the press was going to say, it was going to be interpreted in that sense. So, the controversy around that was going to be massive … that was the thought.”
Lee also acknowledged the heightened global tensions happening at the time (in February 2025) did nothing to ease the minds of Board members about the potential backlash that would result if Sabsabi’s invitation to be Australia’s representative at the Biennale was not rescinded.
“If you will recall, the Dural caravan full of explosives – [a story] that has now been debunked … that caravan had just been discovered, so the Board was put into this position,” Lee explained.
“But the horrible thing about this situation is that we felt as if we had to cut down the negative comments and the bigotry,” she continued.
“Because the situation at that time – and still in these times globally – it gives rise to bigotry and those voices which are not very productive.
“It was all about trying to shut down the bigotry. That was the intent.”
For additional reporting on Creative Australia’s decision to reinstate Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino as Australia’s 2026 Venice Biennale representatives.
