Two Painters, Two Laws and One Big Spirit

This article featuring selected paintings by the multimedia artist Khaled Sabsabi was commissioned and drafted well-prior to the furore surrounding his celebrated appointment (with curator Michael Dagostino) to represent Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale. The appointment was rescinded only six days later. As an art historian undertaking the unruly task of writing about contemporary art as a type of future history, I feel compelled to contextualise my original article, which I proposed as a reflection on Sabsabi’s more contemplative material practice.

I saw the sun
I sang my song
I danced my dance
I saw my shadow
I saw my soul
I made my mark!

Historically, Aboriginal people across the continent, whether intentional or casual, could identify the presence of another named person from their indexical mark; footprint, handprint, bum print or body print. It was the first art, and marked this site as my land. This idea was behind my performance I saw the Sun, in 2004, under the Story Bridge in Brisbane, in which I stripped down and danced as the rising sun left my mark as a shadow (the ancestral spirit) on the river’s muddy shore. Made into a video, it was included in two exhibitions in Brisbane in 2004 and 2005.

The last essay I contributed to Artlink examined recent curatorial efforts to insert Philippa Cullen (1950–1975) into the canon of Australian feminist performance art history. The revisionist energies amplifying the contributions of an emerging experimental artist of the early seventies, were institutionally performed via the National Gallery of Australia’s (NGA) Know My Name project. As important as the project has been in critically redressing gender imbalance and historical gaps in the NGA’s collection, it stirred great debate and highlighted the multitude of important female-identifying and non-binary artists, living and dead, who fail to cut through.

In August 2024 I joined Wollongong Art Gallery as its seventh director in its almost 50-year history. Immediately immersed in its large collection as a crash course in its cultural and sociopolitical contribution to Australian (largely regional) art history, I kept returning to the enigmatic work of a local and long-forgotten painter Joan Meats (1920–2003).