Khaled Sabsabi

The Lock-Up presents the first Newcastle exhibition of acclaimed Lebanese Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi spanning almost 20 years of practice. Free event, bookings are 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 over 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. Presented at The Lock-Up Sabsabi’s works are a conversation and panorama of the artist’s practice, 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, which still hold for Sabsabi the possibility of collective transcendence.