Opening Event // Khaled Sabsabi

OPENING EVENT // Saturday 14 August 2-5pm
Commencing with Artist Talk between Khaled Sabsabi & Artist Profile Editor Kon Gouriotis 2-3pm.
Free event, bookings essential!

Presented for the first time at The Lock-Up, this is the most significant exhibition to date for Lebanese Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi. Featuring a selection of works produced a nearly twenty-year period, including never-before-seen works by the nationally and internationally renowned artist.

In late 1976, following the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon (1975-1990) Sabsabi migrated to Australia with his family, settling in Western Sydney where he still lives and works today. The artist works across multiple mediums and his art deals with concepts of nationhood, identity and change. Since the late 1980s, he has worked with communities on arts projects that explore place, displacement, marginalisation, and ideological differences associated with the human condition.

All of Sabsabi’s works presented at The Lock-Up resonate together as a conversation and panorama of the artist’s practice, which is heavily informed both by his biography and by his interest in tasawwuf spirituality, more widely known as Sufism, a practice within Islam. In this moment of renewed global shifts towards intolerance, these artworks convey a complex landscape of history and personal experiences that expresses the apprehensions of an increasingly uncertain world but one which, for the artist, still holds possibilities of collective transcendence.

‘This exhibition is a personal map of sorts that traces the complex relationship between the self and other, between

belief, devotion and the possibilities for transcendence. Join me on this journey.’

— Khaled Sabsabi, 2024