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.

In Sabsabi’s practice this impulse is employed to question the regressive binaries that foster nationalism, tribalism, religious sectarianism, and the shallow, instrumentalist reasons for bigotry and intolerance. To engage with Sabsabi’s work is to witness a search for meanings and categories that pertain as much to the spiritual world as to the despair of our political moment.

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.

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 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.

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.

The piece takes much of its performative language from the sensuous, twining forms of Arabic calligraphy... Writing With The Hip initially breaks speech back into its syllabic elements, deliberately echoing children being taught language... Sounds become dance rhythms, too, helped by an excellent score from Khaled Sabsabi.

Sabsabi, from Granville started out performing in garages and formed his first band COD (Count On Damage) in the late '80s. He has since been involved in numerous theatre projects as well as the youth project Hiphopera. To him, hip hop is poetry with a conscience and he uses it to raise issues such as cultural identity and xenophobia.

Cultural theorists have claimed that the most interesting art is produced in places where two or more cultures are interacting... The shell of St Patrick's Cathedral is an incredibly suggestive space. The stone walls are still standing, but, above, the skeletal rafters are open to the sky... In what is perhaps a subtle joke, the DJ table is placed where the altar would normally be (a God who can dance?). The sound artist Khaled Sabsabi and voice performer/mixer Saleh Saqqaf provide excellent work.

Reflecting the way in which society has become complacent through the onslaught of propaganda, Sabsabi does not offer an explicit narrative through his work, rather he is asking the audience to uncover the layers of presentation, defying any preconceived ideas.

a strong Arabic focus and would act as the key means of reconciliation... A 3,000-strong Arabic celebration of unity, or dabkeh, would take place on the streets of Bankstown next month as planned, while performances by artists from Arabic backgrounds such as hip-hop artist and youth worker Khaled Sabsabi were expected to be highlights