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.

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.

Deep and perennial questions of spirit, history and the appalling, eternally-recurring reality of war. Sabsabi’s personal engagement with these concerns has produced a remarkable body of work that, justifiably and inevitably, breaks down the norms of the insular, still-largely Western and nationalistic, Australian Art world.

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.

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 rather austere Sydney Opera House halls will reverberate to the Global Sounds Series, a world music melting pot featuring hardcore hip hop sound artist Khaled Sabsabi, fusion rhythm-masters Passionfruit and the Spanish-German poet Jose Olivier, who will present his work with flamenco dancer Diana Reyes.

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.

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'

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.