At the 2026 Venice Biennale, Lebanese-Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi turns inward to explore something profoundly universal: the relationship between the self, the other, and the forces that bring people together.

Representing Australia at the Australia Pavilion with conference of one’s self, while simultaneously presenting khalil in the Biennale’s main exhibition, Sabsabi has become the first Australian artist in the Biennale’s history to appear in both exhibitions. Across the two works, he creates an immersive meditation on identity, spirituality, migration and collective consciousness.

For Sabsabi, transformation begins with the individual. His pavilion installation invites visitors into an atmospheric world of slowly moving abstract imagery, shifting faces and carefully orchestrated light and sound. Rather than dictating a single interpretation, the work asks each visitor to slow down, look closely and recognise something of themselves in what surrounds them.

The experience draws deeply from the spiritual traditions of the East, particularly Farid al-Din Attar’s celebrated Sufi poem The Conference of the Birds. Written in Persian in the twelfth century, the poem follows a flock of birds travelling through seven valleys in search of the mythical Simorgh. Their journey becomes one of self-discovery: after surviving the trials of the journey, the remaining birds ultimately realise that what they were seeking exists within themselves.

Sabsabi translates this ancient story into a contemporary visual language. The pavilion becomes a space of movement and contemplation, where images emerge, overlap and dissolve, encouraging visitors to experience the work at their own rhythm. The journey is deliberately slow, allowing perception to become part of the artwork itself.

His long-standing relationship with music also shapes this visual language. Having worked extensively with hip-hop and sound, Sabsabi approaches images almost as a musician approaches samples, layering fragments to create rhythm, movement and atmosphere. The result is an installation that feels less like something to simply observe and more like something to enter.

At the heart of the work is Sabsabi’s belief that individuality and collectivity are not opposites. Instead, understanding oneself can become a pathway towards understanding others. The faces appearing throughout the installation reinforce this idea, creating moments where the boundary between viewer and artwork, self and other, begins to blur.

This exploration carries particular weight within Sabsabi’s own biography. Born in Lebanon, he left the country at the age of 12 during the Lebanese Civil War before settling in Australia. Migration, displacement and the search for belonging have consequently remained important threads throughout his practice. His work does not treat movement simply as geographical displacement, but as an emotional and spiritual condition—one that can reshape how an individual understands home, identity and connection.

This sense of movement continues in khalil, presented in the Biennale’s main exhibition In Minor Keys. The installation combines oud fragrance, music and projected imagery across a monumental 40-metre-long canvas. Visitors move around the work in an anti-clockwise procession, evoking the circular movement of whirling dervishes and introducing another dimension of Sabsabi’s exploration of spirituality.

While conference of one’s self looks towards the outer self and its relationship with others, khalil turns more deeply inward. Together, the two works form a dialogue between the internal and external worlds, connected by the same spiritual foundation.

For an artist whose work has consistently moved between cultures, disciplines and forms of expression, Venice becomes an especially fitting setting. The Biennale itself is a meeting point of different histories, identities and perspectives, bringing together voices from across the world within a single city.

Sabsabi’s contribution arrives at a moment when that dialogue feels particularly urgent. Against a backdrop of conflict, migration and uncertainty, his work proposes stillness not as an escape from reality, but as a way of confronting it more consciously.

His Venice presentation ultimately asks a deceptively simple question: what happens when we look closely enough at ourselves to recognise others within us?

For Sabsabi, the answer lies somewhere between the spiritual and the human—in the space where individual awakening can become collective understanding.