Mirrors crack when cowards stare too long

Artist Khaled Sabsabi was abruptly dropped as Australia’s 2026 Venice Biennale representative after a high-profile publication raised questions about a past work by him depicting a Hezbollah leader.

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/australia-drops-2026-venice-biennale-khaled-sabsabi-hezbollah-video-1234732394/ 

Creative Australia,
From the land of dust and Dreamtime,
But the dreams don’t run free.
Not here. Not now.
Not when the brushstroke bends the wrong way,
Not when the canvas cuts too close to the bone.

Khaled paints in echoes,
Layers of light and loss,
But you? You bring the blackout,
Pull the plug, shut the door,
Lock the gallery and call it good governance.

Too much, you say,
Too tangled in trouble,
Too near to names that make hands shake,
As if art should be a whisper,
Not a scream.

Venice was waiting,
The grand old hall of thought and time,
And he was ready—
|Brush in hand, truth in frame,
A man with a mirror for the world to see.

But mirrors crack when cowards stare too long.

And you? You flinched.
Tore it down before it could stand,
Like a wave pulling back from the shore,
Afraid of the weight of its own return.

Art is no anthem, no pledge of allegiance.
It doesn’t march in line,
Doesn’t kneel to comfort,
Does’t bow to fear.
Art asks, it twists, it pulls.
And if it doesn’t?
Then it ain’t art.

Creative Australia,
You smother your fire,
Turn your back on the burn,
But the heat won’t vanish—
It waits.
In the brushstrokes, in the silence,
In the spaces where voices should be.

Beat on, Sabsabi, beat on.
Paint in the dark if you have to,
Because truth doesn’t need a stage,
It just needs someone
To keep looking.