Sabsabi challenges the configuration of the Australian bodypolitic by presenting a kaleidoscopic flux of facial fragments which have to be organised by our minds. Sabsabi’s installation captures the profound aesthetics of beauty, ugliness and all that lies in between.

The last memory I have of my early life was standing in front of my grandmother and not wanting to say goodbye or to let her go before being taken out of Lebanon. Coming to a new land I felt out of the ordinary—everything was different and unfamiliar. People didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand them.

They do not form narrative sequences, but as aggregations they create a substantial impression of Sabsabi’s experience of place. They are autobiographical. There is a personal investment in these images, of a particular place and time as if the conjoined condition of both being there (in Beirut) and not (being in Western Sydney working back over the images) turns them into ciphers of migrant experience.

The true magic was in the nuanced details: each stitch of embroidered thread sewing a history; each minute gesture of painting compounding in a definitive message. It was up to the viewer to tease out the thread, to formulate a promise, to accept the artist’s invitation of a universal prayer for all.

Sabsabi does not aestheticise war, nor does he take sides, but at the core of his diverse artistic practice lies a commitment to social justice. His art reflects both his background as an immigrant Australian as well as his professional work with youth communities in Western Sydney, in which he often deals with issues of violence, racism and discrimination.

For ‘in memory we trust’ this is reflected in my choice to use light, colour inversions and materials to make objects which denote our memories, visible yet invisible. The intent to abstract designs in ‘in memory we trust’, is my attempt to lead to the translation into deformation and the irrationalities of voidness.

Sabsabi's installation captures the profound aesthetics of beauty, ugliness and all that lies in between, which doesn't allow a separate and defined cultural reading of an individual.

Sabsabi's Syria is a provocation to those who hold an entirely reasonable expectation that a label exists to act as a logical descriptor of its referent. Let's be clear: Syria is not about Syria. The work signals Sabsabi's fascination with the ways by which beneath the surface of things there can exist a metaphorical structure opposed to that surface.

Wonderland places the viewer in the exact moment where places converge. A two-channel video depicts jeering crowds at a soccer match, the fans cheer and sledge in uncanny similarity; they wear the same colours, sing the same songs, hold the same banners and are both supporters of the Western Sydney Wanderers. However, while their allegiance is aligned, Sabsabi forces the viewer to discriminate between the two. In Majority/Minority the sound for Wonderland is overpowering. Standing between two speakers the cheers melt into an unbearable dissonance where the only relief is to move towards one side and, in essence, to pick a side.

Sabsabi undoes eschatological and esoteric binaries of the sacred and profane, the secular and religious, the blasphemous and divine, the body and soul, through a technical brilliance infused with a theopolitical sensibility. Across 99 unevenly distributed television screens Sabsabi captures the embodied intricacies of a nameless dervish in his surging ontological transformation.

He [Sabsabi] has also had extensive experience as a community advocate, curator and event organiser. He knows better than most the barriers that separate multicultural and community practices from the mainstream of art production and disseminationÑbarriers that are geographic, and cultural.

Using video screens, hip-hop music on blasting sound systems, especially constructed dance floors and rebuilt cars, Hip Hopera will be a collaborative event between DDT and the young people of the area - especially those from non-English-speaking backgrounds

His latest workshop, the 2168 Project, linking hip hop artists with about 30 youths from Green Valley, Liverpool and Miller in western Sydney, aims to channel this anger creatively and break down stereotypes about young people from non-English-speaking backgrounds. There is also a strong job skills component, with students from previous workshops landing jobs running street magazines, working in community radio and starting their own hip hop groups.

Where many of his contemporaries are seemingly self-satisfied in exploring shallow waters further limited in their navigation by their relatively myopic frames of cultural reference, taking as their concerns or absurdly ominous sounding 'interrogations' narrow subjects of social, historical or aesthetic inquiry, Sabsabi has continued to dive into deeper depths of the human experience, pursuing a very personal yet paradoxically resounding universal invocation of truth.

Artists engaged in political art cannot ignore their context or background. It is understandable then, that The Resilient Landscape was filled with work acutely aware and informed by their experiences and emotions, they responded fully aware that their actions would not achieve a sustained result, knowing that they would succeed simply in being seen, heard and recorded

With the largest geographical area and the greatest number of countries, the continent is a complex region of political systems, diverse cultures, with a multitude of changes and expeditious development. It is perhaps inevitable that its progress will have an enormous influence on the stability, modification and transformation of global political and economic structures.

It's about their story, it's their experiences, this is what they want to do, this is what they want to say. And that varies from place to place, from person to personÉ it's about them documenting their stories, their experiences, the way that the want other people, or the public, or the world, to see them.

A visual artist, prolific sound producer and community cultural engagement producer at Casula Powerhouse, Sydney typifies the nexus of religious, cultural and artistic identities within a seamless web of complex art works that have garnered him most recently the prestigious Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship from the NSW Government.