I was directly confronted with the realities that I was just another privileged tourist, high on romantic notions of belonging and childhood memories. Also because here I was working my life away in another place and land for art, social awareness and justice, forgetting my people’s situations and their suffered hardships

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.

The rap notes and personal archive of artist Khaled Sabsabi tell stories of a personal journey to freedom from asylum, involving hardship along the way; even though religion or social positions entail discrimination and isolation, freedom is the final destination. In his archive, photographic portraits of Sabsabi are placed alongside a t-shirt designed by the artist showing a print of Osama Bin Laden and a poster for the freedom of Palestine amongst other objects.

The 'return' of objects with 'low' cultural value to the space of the museum - such as shoes used by Sabsabi and Saouli in Oversite - creates a possibility for articulating difference in historical representation through audience participation. This possibility refers to both the expansion of the meaning of the object in the gallery - from functional to subjective - and the status of the audience's experience. This notion of audience experience entails attention to shoes as objects disengaged from their everyday function to layer different meanings and temporalities and produce moments of experiential tension. The tension was to result from the double reflection of shoes as both symbols of everyday routine (and the implicit complacency), and in their (voluntary) removal from that community.

He also knows that many Australians could not even point to Lebanon on a map, much less offer an informed opinion on a region that is, after all, a very long way away. Fortunately he has the capacity (like so many good artists) to distill complex issues into a few carefully chosen and striking visual metaphors or forms.

Sabsabi's installation captures the profound aesthetics of beauty, ugliness and all what lies in-between, revealing the inherent polycultural nature of Australia. But much more than that, there is a meaning that can be grasped when one gets too close to the close-ups. Each screen is sovereign. It embodies its own facial allocation as well as seamlessly being part of a face.

This exhibition, then, is about borders and boundaries, both physical and conceptual. More precisely, it is about the pressure imposed on borders in a world that becomes more fluid and interconnected day by day. To state the obvious, borders are an artifice designed to both include and exclude.

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.

Since 1990 Sabsabi has worked with communities in Western Sydney to create and develop arts led programs that explore people and places from a broad social, political and religious spectrum.

Sabsabi, a non-English-speaking background community outreach worker in Liverpool, has been working in the arts community for 15 years, but rapping much longer. He is performing at a hip-hop concert at the Opera House as part of the Global Sound Series

Any notion that these kids are just copying American styles quickly becomes untenable - these raps, in a variety of local accents, are so real you can smell the authenticity. Race, drugs, police harassment, violence and the experience of living in Western Sydney are some of the concerns which run through the raps.

Looking forward to this remarkable event in 2002, you can't help but think that, as lucky as we are to have it, its a shame that for many of us it takes something like Carnivale to open our eyes to the riches around us. Once our eyes are open, however, there's much in the way of international music to see

Being labeled 'multi-cultural' excludes you from the rest of the population as an artist by the colour of your skin. but the idea of Carnivale is good. It gives people who don't have easy access to the mainstream, an opportunity to display their works. But there is a lot of red tape. if you are a good artist, you should be called a good artist not a 'multicultural artist'

Sabsabi's interpretation of the Prophet is a transgressive view. It falls somewhere between being a respectful witness and an outsider to Islamic teaching. His is a continuum between these positions, a notion of the infinite bringing centuries of Sufism spirituality into the now.

Sabsabi's twenty years of practice as an artist and performer is a testament to his commitment to his community, his people and his love of the land. While the work has deep philosophical and spiritual concerns, the overall experience is immersive and musical, becoming neither didactic nor patriotic.

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.