Thank YOU Very Much Creative Australia

By Görkem Acaroğlu

Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi has been dismissed from representing Australia on the international stage. Sabsabi’s offence was making an artwork seventeen years ago that included a historical figure who led a political party and military group that, three years ago, was deemed a terrorist organisation by the Australian government.

BUT

Elon Musk, billionaire and now Senior Advisor to the President of the United States, can stand on a world stage and perform two—not one, but two—Nazi salutes. And in response to concerns about this performance Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can post on Musk’s social media platform X that “Elon Musk is being falsely smeared, he is a great friend of Israel.”¹

Meanwhile, Sabsabi is dismissed, not for an egregious display of white supremacy, but because he produced an artwork that responded critically to the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. Using his work entitled ‘Thank You Very Much,’ in which U.S. president at the time, George Bush, says “thank you very much”, journalists from The Australian and various politicians have retroactively implied a specific meaning to the artwork, prompting Creative Australia to rescind the artist’s nomination to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale.

BUT

The self-proclaimed president of Syria, Al-Jolani/Al-Sharaa, is met by world leaders with open arms, after having been intimately affiliated with terrorist organisations ISIS and Al-Qaeda for years.²

To dismiss a Lebanese-Australian artist—as the media continues to define Sabsabi—all one needs to do is mention that he made a work about 9/11 entitled ‘Thank You Very Much,’ and imply by association that the work glorifies the attack. But if a white Australian artist nominated to represent the country at Venice made a similar work about 9/11 nearly two decades ago, and called it ‘Thank You Very Much,’ the assumptions would be entirely different. In fact, it probably wouldn’t even get a mention.

Sabsabi’s digital artworks are multi-layered and multi-dimensional, and like all good art, they leave the viewer to make their own meaning. The meaning that The Australian journalists, various politicians and bureaucrats have settled on, from just the title of the work, is blatantly racist.

If Sabsabi were not Lebanese/Arab/Muslim, would Yoni Bashan and Nick Evans, the Australian ‘journalists’ who began the campaign to have Sabsabi dismissed, have dug through the artist’s website for “controversial” pieces to put in question his nomination? And would the media and politicians read a work about 9/11 entitled ‘Thank You Very Much’ in which George Bush says, “thank you very much,” as a literal “thank you” for 9/11, if the work had been made by a white Australian?

Since 9/11, we in the West have been primed to identify Muslim/Arab/’Middle Eastern looking people’ as terrorists.³ Benjamin Netanyahu himself has played a pivotal role in crafting this anti-Arab/Anti-Muslim definition of terrorism. For example, he convened two important conferences on terrorism, one in 1979 in Jerusalem and one in 1984 in Washington. Netanyahu then edited the very successful book that resulted from the second conference, Terrorism: How the West Can Win. These conferences and subsequent book were critical to how the world views terrorism today.⁴

For those that keep abreast of the West’s role in West Asia (the Middle East), we know that 9/11 was a green light for the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and subsequent occupation of the country for 20 years; for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the death of half a million Iraqi children from sanctions, the continued occupation of Iraq’s oil fields; for the destruction of Libya; and for the proxy wars in Sudan, Somalia, Yemen. We know that almost 5 million people have been killed in Muslim-majority countries since the U.S. declared its “War on Terror”. All of this was well underway when Sabsabi made the artwork in question. Is Sabsabi saying “thank you” to the terrorists for the 9/11 attacks, when George Bush is the one saying thank you?

According to the new shadow arts minister, Claire Chandler, the woman who proudly instigated this mess, art should be a place for people to escape to and be entertained. “We have to keep in mind”, she told Sky News, “the overwhelming majority of Australians who access the arts in some sort of way aren’t doing so to get a dose of a political viewpoint”.⁵

God forbid art makes people think or feel or question or contemplate their existence. If Chandler’s party win the next election, we can look forward to the previously named Australia Council for the Arts, (now Creative Australia), no doubt being called, ‘Entertainment Australia’.

Former Museum of Contemporary Art Director, Liz Ann Macgregor, recently defended Sabsabi in a Guardian article when she said, “he is not an angry young man doing provocative work that is going to get everybody angry in the Venice Pavillion”. Of course he isn’t—the Australian art world would not nominate an angry young man to represent them.

But perhaps what we need are angry people—outraged artists in the West who comment on the world we live in—a world where Nazi salutes by billionaires are not seen as antisemitic BUT actors wearing scarves are. A world in which actual terrorists can put on a suit and be absolved from their crimes.

Artists take note: moving forward we may only be able to make work that allows people to “escape from the world for a few hours,” as Chandler put it.⁶

Thank YOU very much Creative Australia

Dr Görkem Acaroğlu is an artist, academic, theatre scholar and anti-racism consultant.

Notes

Author

Bren