Khaled Sabsabi's Sufi-Inspired Art Explores Beyond Human Perception

Lebanese Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi has spent nearly 40 years exploring questions of divine consciousness and existence beyond human perception through his art, drawing on the philosophy of tasawwuf (Sufism). Born in 1965 in Tripoli, Lebanon, Sabsabi fled the Lebanese Civil War with his family in the late 1970s, settling in Western Sydney, Australia, where his parents ran a video and music shop. This early exposure to Arab music influenced his video and mixed-media installations, which often feature sonic elements and visual repetition mirroring spiritual practice. His 18-minute video work Lefke Morning (2012–18), filmed in Cyprus, shows members of the Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi Order performing Zikr at dawn. The deliberately out-of-focus, green-tinted footage initially evokes night-vision combat imagery from the Iraq War, but transforms into a serene soundscape of communal prayer. Before becoming a visual artist, Sabsabi performed hip-hop as Peacefender in the 1980s, finding resonance with Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's The Message (1982), which critiqued inequality. He has used hip-hop to address societal issues through workshops and projects like Hip Hopera, working in schools, detention centers, refugee camps, hospitals, and prisons.