Creative Australia says it won’t reinstate artist Khaled Sabsabi for Venice Biennale at tense all-staff meeting | Australian art

The artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino will not be reinstated as Australia’s representatives at the next Venice Biennale despite thousands of artists calling for the decision to be overturned.

The chair of Creative Australia, Robert Morgan, and the organisation’s executive director, Adrian Collette, told an all-staff meeting on Thursday that the decision to withdraw the Venice contract to avoid a potential public outcry would not be revised.

It is now looking increasingly likely that the Australian pavilion, which last year won the Golden Lion with Archie Moore’s kith and kin exhibition, will remain empty for the 2026 event.

Artists and curators from all five of the shortlisted teams for the prestigious show have called publicly for the winners to be reinstated, condemning Creative Australia’s decision as “antithetical to the goodwill and hard-fought artistic independence, freedom of speech and moral courage that is at the core of arts in Australia”.

Thousands of other artists have signed a petition calling for Sabsabi and Dagostino’s reinstatement.

It comes amid revelations the National Gallery of Australia covered up two Palestinian flags in a major exhibition it hosted.

More than 100 angry staff peppered Morgan and Collette with questions for the better part of two hours during Thursday’s meeting, with several staff challenging the pair over whether they should remain in leadership positions at the government’s principal arts investment and advisory body, a source told Guardian Australia.

The Guardian understands Collette indicated he did not believe his role had become “untenable” yet.

Early on Thursday, one of Australia’s pre-eminent artists, Ben Quilty, entered the debate, telling ABC Radio National he believed Sabsabi had become “collateral damage”.

“Governance failure upon governance failure – let’s put that aside,” Quilty said.

“The thing that I found most extraordinary was that the work that keeps being brought up by Khaled – (You, a 2007 work which includes images of the then Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah) – is 20 years old. Nasrallah was a legitimate political leader in the Middle East at that time. It was 12 years later that he and his organisation were designated as terrorists and to bring Khaled down for that is just mind-blowing.

“I think it’s a sad indictment on the way politics and broader society end up affecting the artist. The artist becomes the soft underbelly, the litmus test, but the first to be brought down when elections need to be won, and the political cycle is so fraught and so heated.”

You, which was gifted to the Museum of Contemporary Art by the artist more than a decade ago, has only been displayed once: in 2009, at the MCA exhibition Making it New: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art.

A spokesperson for the MCA said a total of 61,276 people visited that exhibition, and an analysis compiled from the visitor comments book and reports authored by gallery staff show there were no noted incidents during the show’s two-month duration.

“There is no statement by the artist to suggest it is a glorification of terrorism,” the MCA director, Suzanne Cotter, said in a statement to the Guardian.

“It is a work that draws upon the artist’s lived experience and addresses the power of the image over words and the ways in which visual media in service of ideology are part of everyday lives,” Cotter said.

“Works of art are an expression of the times in which they were made. The heightened cultural tensions of the present should not determine the validity of a work of art created at another moment in time, nor should they be used to interpret the intentions of the artist beyond the work of art itself.”

Sabsabi fled Lebanon’s civil war as a child to live in Australia.