Public Forum: Who’s Afraid of Khaled Sabsabi?
By Josh Milani, Anthony Gardner, Louise Adler, Ghassan Hage, and Azza Zein
Issue 3, Autumn/Winter 2025
On Monday 7 April, Memo convened a panel discussion at the Greek Centre in Melbourne in response to recent institutional decisions affecting the artist Khaled Sabsabi. The event was at full capacity, with over 600 people on the waiting list. We share here the opening statements.
Video by NON Studio.
Speakers in order of appearance:
Josh Milani, director of Milani Gallery, representing Khaled Sabsabi.
Anthony Gardner, Professor at the University of Oxford, 2025 Dobell Chair in Art History at ANU, and a member of the Panel of Industry Advisors for the Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2026.
Louise Adler, who has had over thirty years of experience on a wide range of arts boards.
Ghassan Hage, Professor of Anthropology and author of The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism (2023).
Azza Zein, interdisciplinary artist and writer whose installations and research explore dematerialisation, displacement, counter-geographies, and the invisibility of labour.
The panel was moderated by Memo editors Helen Hughes and Paris Lettau, and introduced by author and cultural theorist Nikos Papastergiadis, whose most recent books are The Cosmos in Cosmopolitanism (2023) and John Berger and Me (2024).
Related
Jas H. Duke was a poet, performer, and anarchist whose art erupted from the margins. In 1973, he returned to Melbourne after years in England, bringing with him an electrified style of performance poetry and a deep affinity for Dada. A fixture of underground cinema and experimental literature, Duke remains difficult to contain.
