Join us in Venice at the Australia Pavilion to attend the launch of the companion, a richly illustrated publication in collaboration with Spector Books, supporting Khaled Sabsabi’s presentation at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.
To mark the launch, a brief conversation will take place in the Australia Pavilion guided by Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino, followed by an opportunity for gathering and celebration.
Alongside documentation of both works, this publication features new writing by Michael Dagostino, Claire Dillon, Kon Gouriotis OAM, Tahmina Maskinyar, Hammad Nasar, Dr Nur Shkembi OAM, and Dr Mikala Tai, edited by José Da Silva.
To place a preorder for the companion, please email venice@creative.gov.au
For further distribution and press materials see here
To enter the Giardini della Biennale, you must purchase an entry ticket through the La Biennale di Venezia website
the companion
The hardcover publication documents and provides new insights on both exhibitions presented by Sabsabi, conference of one’s self at the Australia Pavilion curated by Michael Dagostino, and khalil within the international exhibition In Minor Keys, conceived by the late curator Koyo Kouoh.
Edited by José Da Silva, Director of UNSW Galleries, Sydney, and designed by Suzanne Boccalatte, founder and creative director of Boccalatte design consultancy, the publication features essays by writers and academics who have followed Sabsabi’s career and practice, providing valuable perspectives and deeper understanding of the artist and his work.
Contributors include: Michael Dagostino, curator of the Australia Pavilion; Claire Dillon, art historian and public scholar; Kon Gouriotis, managing director of Bandicoot Publishing, Art Almanac, and Artist Profile; Tahmina Maskinyar, researcher, writer, and curator at West Space, Melbourne; Hammad Nasar, curator, writer, and director of programmes and content at Ibraaz, London; Nur Shkembi, curator, writer, and art historian; and Mikala Tai, writer, curator, and cultural strategist.
Title: the companion
Editor: José Da Silva
Designer: Suzanne Boccalatte
Pub Date: 23 September 2026
Binding: Hardcover
Extent: 256 pages
Illustrations: 150 color images
Trim Size: 14.5 x 19.5 cm
ISBN: 978-3-69370-002-0 EN
Price: 32 euros
Khaled Sabsabi
Artist, Australia Pavilion 2026
Khaled Sabsabi is an acclaimed, award-winning Australian multidisciplinary artist whose work explores human collectiveness, the complexities of identity politics, and the impact of ideology through a continual transfer between the material and the philosophical. For over 35 years, he has worked across mediums and borders, collaborating with communities locally and internationally. Sabsabi’s work centres on social justice and lived experience informed by his migration from Lebanon in 1976 to escape the civil war. Sabsabi has been the recipient of more than fifteen international awards, including the Creative Australia ‘Annual Visual Arts Award’ 2023, International Council of Museums' and Heritage Awards, Video Art Prize 2016, and the Sharjah Art Programme Prize in 2016. He has produced more than 65 major mixed media and installation-based works to date, exhibiting in over 90 solo and group art exhibitions in Australia and internationally including 5th Marrakech Biennale, 18th Biennale of Sydney and the 21st Biennale of Sydney, 9th Shanghai Biennale, Sharjah Biennial 11, 1st Yinchuan Biennale, 3rd Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 2018 and 2024. Sabsabi is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane.
Michael Dagostino
Curator, Australia Pavilion 2026
Michael Dagostino is the Director of the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney. As a relatively new museum, it unites the university’s diverse collections into a multidisciplinary institution dedicated to education and community engagement. As founding director of Parramatta Artists Studios, he established a key platform for emerging artists. In 2011, he became Director of Campbelltown Arts Centre, where he continued an artist-driven program supporting local, national, and international collaborations. Notable projects include With Secrecy and Despatch (2016), co-curated with Tess Allas and David Garneau, exploring colonial impacts through the Appin Massacre, and Another Day in Paradise (2017), showcasing Myuran Sukumaran’s work co-curated by Ben Quilty. Dagostino curated Lisa Reihana’s Cinemania (2018) and commissioned the Australian First Nations component of her In Pursuit of Venus [Infected] for the New Zealand Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2017). A Hope and A Promise (2021), co-curated by Adam Porter and Matt Cox, surveyed Khaled Sabsabi’s 30-year practice held at the Art Gallery of NSW and Campbelltown Arts Centre.
José Da Silva
Editor
José Da Silva is an Australian curator and the Director of Sydney’s UNSW Galleries, where he has led a program of contemporary Australian art and design since 2018. In 2024, he curated the 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art and became Chair of University Art Museums Australia. From 2006-18, he also contributed widely to a program of exhibitions, commissions, acquisitions, and events at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, including a role in the curatoriums for five editions of the ‘Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’. He has contributed writing to a wide variety of publications, including monographs for the Queensland Art Gallery, National Gallery of Australia, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Room40, Gertrude Contemporary, and Institute of Modern Art.
Suzanne Boccalatte
Designer
Suzanne Boccalatte is an award-winning designer, writer and cultural theorist whose practice spans more than three decades. As founder and creative director of Boccalatte, she has led visual and strategic work across Australia’s cultural sector for organisations including Powerhouse, ACMI, Carriageworks, Sydney Opera House, ABC, the Art Gallery of South Australia, HOTA, Bundanon and UNSW Galleries. Her work is held in national collections including the National Gallery of Australia and Powerhouse. Boccalatte was formerly Professor of Practice at UNSW Art & Design and completed a PhD at Western Sydney University in 2026.
Claire Dillon
Contributing Writer
Claire Dillon is an art historian and public scholar researching the intersections of visual cultures, identities, and faiths in the medieval Mediterranean and their modern afterlives. In addition to her writing on contemporary art, she studies histories of medieval silk production and its legacies in modern design, the architecture of Italian Empire, and the ways in which the medieval past is exploited by modern extremist movements. She is a PhD candidate at Columbia University, specializing in the arts of the lands of Islam. Her work has been supported by the American Academy in Rome, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mellon Foundation, and the International Interfaith Research Lab, among other institutions.
Kon Gouriotis
Contributing Writer
Kon Gouriotis OAM has been a leader in Australia’s visual arts scene for more than three decades. He held Director roles at the Australian Centre for Photography (2011–13), the Australia Council for the Arts’ Visual Arts, (2008–11) and Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre (1998-2008). In 2015 he joined national journal Artist Profile as editor and in 2018 co-founded Bandicoot Publishing, which is responsible for Artist Profile and Art Almanac magazines and Bandicoot Books. Fairfield-born Gouriotis has continually found inspiration in Western Sydney’s artists and cultural practitioners. In 1990, he co-founded the region’s first artist run initiative, Street Level (Blacktown), and during his time at Casula Powerhouse he showcased numerous talented and largely unknown local artists. For 30 years, Gouriotis has championed the work of Khaled Sabsabi, evidenced in 2023 by his role as commissioning editor of the first comprehensive monograph on the artist.
Tahmina Maskinyar
Contributing Writer
Tahmina Maskinyar is a curator, researcher and writer, born in Kabul and raised near the Djarlgarro Beelier (Canning River) on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja. Her practice creates space for artistic work to flourish at the intersection of critical discourse, place, and global solidarities. She is currently curator at West Space, a contemporary art gallery in Yálla-birr-ang on Wurundjeri Country (Collingwood, Melbourne). Maskinyar holds First Class Honours in Architecture from the University of Western Australia (2011) and is completing a PhD in Art History at Monash University, examining Afghan identity through diasporic memory and nation-state formation to understand how visibility is constructed within the global art industry. Most recently, she produced the Golden Lion-winning exhibition kith and kin by Archie Moore and curator Ellie Buttrose at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024). Her writing has been published in un Magazine, Art Guide Australia, Fine Print Magazine, West Space Offsite and Architecture Australia.
Hammad Nasar
Contributing Writer
Hammad Nasar is a curator, writer and Director of Programmes & Content at Ibraaz, London. He was Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre (part of Yale University), where he co-led the ‘London, Asia’ project, and Principal Research Fellow at UAL’s Decolonising Arts Institute. Previously, he was: Executive Director of the Stuart Hall Foundation, London; Head of Research & Programmes at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; and co-founder of Green Cardamom, London. Known for collaborative, exhibition-led inquiry, Nasar has curated or co-curated numerous international exhibitions, including: Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Now and Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends (both 2023–24); British Art Show 9 (2021–22); Turner Prize (2021); Rock, Paper, Scissors: Positions in Play – the UAE’s national pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017); and Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (2005–14).
Dr Nur Shkembi OAM
Contributing Writer
Dr Nur Shkembi OAM is a curator, writer and art historian specialising in Islamic art, contemporary art and postcolonial theory. Nur has produced and curated over 150 events, exhibitions and community engagement projects and was part of the core team which established the Islamic Museum of Australia, serving as the museum’s inaugural Art Director, Exhibitions Manager and foundation Curator. Much of her interest has been in the development of community awareness in relation to the arts with a focus on the presence of Australian Muslim artists in the cultural landscape. Nur has written for academic texts and journals, exhibition catalogues and is a published author, with her debut novel Rookie distributed nationwide for the Australian high school curriculum by Cengage. Her writing is also featured in the National Gallery of Victoria’s Gallery magazine, un Magazine, Artist Profile, Crikey and ReOrient. Nur engages her independent curatorial practice nationally, exhibitions include Waqt al Tagheer (ACE Open) Khalas! (UNSW Galleries), The Inner Apartment (Nishi Gallery and National Museum of Australia), We Are All Affected (Fairfield City Museum and Peacock Gallery), SOUL fury (Bendigo Art Gallery), Destiny Disrupted (Granville Arts Centre, Sydney and Griffith University Art Museum), DOMINION (University of Melbourne) and Five Acts of Love (ACCA). Nur is a founding member of eleven; a collective of contemporary Muslim Australian artists, curators and writers.
Mikala Tai
Contributing Writer
Mikala Tai is an independent writer, curator and cultural strategist based in Sydney. A specialist in contemporary Australian and Asian art, she has collaborated with local, national, and international organisations to strengthen cultural connections between Australia and Asia. Starting her career at the National Gallery of Victoria, Mikala has most recently served as Head of Visual Arts at Creative Australia, where she was Project Director for Archie Moore’s Gold Lion–winning ‘kith and kin’. Prior to that, she was Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. In 2015, she received her PhD, examining the influence of the global city on China’s local art infrastructure, and continues to maintain an active role in academia. Recent work can be found in writing for Art Review, Artist Profile, and Art and Australia, and as exhibition projects across Australia.
About the Partnership
UNSW Arts, Design & Architecture (ADA) has been appointed as the exclusive Education Partner for Australia’s participation in the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. The appointment marks a significant new partnership between UNSW Sydney and Creative Australia, the Australian Government’s peak arts funding body and the commissioning organisation for Australia’s representation at the Venice Biennale 2026. As Education Partner, UNSW ADA, led by UNSW Galleries, is delivering a comprehensive suite of public programs in Sydney and Venice, developing education resources and the Pavilion’s official catalogue, and creating professional learning opportunities for UNSW students and staff.