The 2003 Art and Australia article, Getting into the Giardini de Castello - Australia’s history of representation at the Venice Biennale presented the history of Australia’s achievements in Venice. Being invited to participate in the 1920s, first presenting in 1954, having an ongoing presence from 1986-2003 and establishing an Australian temporary Pavilion in the Giardini in 1988, was a significant accomplishment. In the 22 years following, Australia continued its uninterrupted participation and replaced Philip Cox’s temporary pavilion with Denton Corker Marshall’s new pavilion, modelled on a black box. In 2024 Australia’s representative Archie Moore and Curator Ellie Buttrose were awarded the Golden Lion for best national participation for his poignant work kith and kin. What begun as steady exposure of Australian contemporary art to an international audience in the mid-twentieth century has since accelerated, with Australia now a significant entity in the Venice Biennale’s lineup of national pavilions.

As highlighted in 2003, Australia’s representation in the Venice Biennale has always been mediated by a peak national entity. Upon an enquiry by Woollahra gallerist Rudy Komon (1908-1982) in 1962 requesting access to the Venice Biennale on behalf of a group of Australian artists, the general secretary for Biennale di Venezia Professor Gian Alberto Dell’Acqua replied ‘… participation of foreign artists at the Venice Biennale takes place through the respective governments and the official bodies which are nominated to carry out the organisation'.¹ This condition of selection has been tested on numerous occasions and Australia has subsequently trialled a number of government sanctioned selection processes, with mixed success. On numerous occasions Australia’s selection of artist/s, including the 2026 selection of Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino, has been fraught.

Australia’s earliest contribution in 1954 was a convenient extension of the Arts Council of Great Britain’s touring show Twelve Australian Artists, exhibiting seventeen works by Russell Drysdale (1912-1981), William Dobell (1899-1970) and Sidney Nolan (1917-1992) in room 34 of the Venice Biennale Central Pavilion of the Giardini.² Whilst the 1954 representation effectively captured something of mid-twentieth century Australian art, Prime Minister Robert Menzies, who held antipathy towards modern art, had significant influence over international exhibition selection. He installed sympathetic committee members on the Commonwealth Arts Advisory Board to perpetuate his vision for an Australian style: not overly complex yet understandable by cultivated people.³

The selection of Arthur Streeton (1867-1943) for the 1958 Biennale, who was then fifteen-years deceased, was consistent with Menzies’s vision. That year’s selection also included the young Arthur Boyd (1920-1999) as concession to what was then contemporary.⁴ However, his input was negligible. Boyd was not consulted about his participation, with landscape works being sourced from a range of galleries, avoiding his then current project, Love, Marriage and Death of a Half Caste, which showed, as Alan McCulloch remarked, ‘rare qualities of perception and imagination'.⁵ Instead, Menzies’s traditional and conservative focus limited representation of both Boyd and Streeton to a pastoral reflection of Australian landscapes. The feedback from the exhibition revealed that Australian contemporary art was considered backward.⁶ Even though noted local arts leaders, including Bernard Smith, Rudy Komon, Georges Mora and John Goody advocated for Australian contemporary art, under conservative leadership Australian living artists would remain absent from the Biennale until 1978.⁷

With the change in federal government from liberal to labour in 1972 and the establishment of the Australian Council following the 1975 Australia Council Act, a new vision for the arts was emerging. Selection for the Venice Biennale shifted from the Commonwealth Arts Advisory Board to the Exhibitions Committee of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council under the directorship of Leon Paroissien and chaired by Elwyn Lynn.

Within the archives of the Department of Foreign Affairs there is a marvellous proposal for the 1978 Biennale by Daniel Thomas, the then curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.⁸ Thomas’s proposal included both contemporary Indigenous artists and some contextual works and, if staged, would have been a significant international exhibition in the mid-70s. Instead, Australia was represented by John Davis, Robert Owen  and Ken Unsworth that year. In a conversation I had with Owen, he affectionately recalled receiving a phone call late one evening from Jack (Elwyn) Lynn suggesting he needed to get his bags packed because he was going to Venice to represent Australia!⁹ A small selection of the three artists’ work was presented in the end room of the Central Pavilion, referred to as ‘the porch’. This became the Australian corner-block, including work by Mike Parr, Kevin Mortensen, and Tony Coleing for the next iteration in 1980.

While Australian representation was sanctioned by the Australian Government in these early years the selection process was obscure. Records of selection process appear to be guided by key State and Territory gallery directors and curators and preliminary meetings with Venice Biennale authorities, who were able to disclose themes to be explored in the forthcoming exhibition. There is little publicly accessible documentation that show how selection committees dealt with applications and proposals, although documents in various archives speculate on ambitious proposals that failed to materialise.¹⁰ 

Richard Dunn, then head of art at the Sydney College of the Arts raised concerns about the selection process and the intent of the Australian Council’s international rationale. In particular, the resources allocated to the 1997 national pavilion in Venice were equivalent to twice the government funding provided to the Sydney Biennale.¹¹ The national selection for the Venice Biennale remained controlled by the Visual Arts Board who made selections and prompted proposals from within the institutional gallery sector. It wasn’t until 2000 when the selection process was broadened with a public media announcement that sought expressions of interest from individual or groups of artists and curators. The proposals required a 1–2 page concept and overview of the artist/s work alongside support material.  The range of artist driven proposals to be shortlisted and eventually selected for exhibition in Venice provided the selection committee with greater diversity. This led to a selection that marked a ‘shift away from more traditional art forms’. ¹² The multimedia artist Lyndal Jones who was chosen to represent Australia in 2001, lamented gallery acquisition processes noting her inability to sell a single work in twenty years although she ‘had beaten off a hot list of contenders’ for selection into the Biennale.¹³

During the first half-decade of the twenty first century Australia continued to seek artist and curatorial proposals responding to the expressions of interest process for the national pavilion.¹⁴ But brewing in the background were financial challenges of ballooning budgets and the inadequate temporary Cox Pavilion. The 2007 selection process departed from the four preceding iterations of a single artist chosen. The commissioner that year, John Kaldor, was able to leverage a network of sponsors and partners to send three discrete exhibitions to Venice hosted across three venues.¹⁵ Daniel von Sturmer exhibited in the Australian Pavilion in the Giardini, Callum Morton presented at Palazzo Zenobio while Susan Norrie showed her work in Palazzo Giustinian Lolin. Australian presence was further amplified by the inclusion of Sean Gladwell, Christian Capurro and Rosemary Laing, in Robert Storr’s Think with the Senses - Feel with the Mind  held across the Central Pavilion and Arsenale. The sponsors and benefactors who supplemented the Australia Council budgets set a new precedent for Australian representation in Venice over the next decade.

In 2008, collector and restaurateur Rinaldo Di Stasio established the Ideas Competition, an unofficial call-out to architects and designers, taunting and tempting them to dream up a new Australian Pavilion in Venice. In 2013 Australia Council committed to a new Pavilion, awarding the commission to Denton Corker Marshall. The building drew on an initial 2008 design of a black box containing a white box (‘the building is a simple canvass and a container’), which was a finalist in the Ideas Competition.¹⁶ Finally, a purpose-built space—one of the most functional in the Giardini. Of course, this required additional funding to supplement the Australian government’s contribution of $1 million towards the pavilion. Some 80 private donors contributed $6.5 million to the construction, including a generous $2 million by the investment banker, art collector, and philanthropist Simon Mordant. Mordant was also the commissioner for the 2015 representation of Fiona Hall, the inaugural exhibitor in the new Australian pavilion. She was selected to show Wrong Way Time, an eclectic selection of 800 objects comprised of works previously shown along with her pseudo military ghosts. The exhibition in the new space drew an audience of 287,000.

Tracy Moffatt was chosen for the 2017 Biennale with some critics suggesting a possible Golden Lion.¹⁷ During this iteration, the chairman of the Australia Council Rupert Meyer made an announcement that future selections for Venice would be undertaken by a Council-managed subcommittee . The Council would directly commission from an open expression-of-interest, Henceforth, the selection process will no longer appoint an independent commissioner or utilise a highly qualified section committee with deep contemporary visual arts expertise. The Australian arts philanthropic sector recoiled. Simon Mordant withdrew from funding involvement due to Australia Council’s lack of communication with its loyal sponsors. Mordant provided a full rationale of his position to The Art Newspaper stating the practice which had been used over the previous decade. 

In the period when I served as Commissioner ... The artist was selected by a panel, which I chaired, of local and international curators who came with a list of artists they considered spoke of issues of the day and were capable of representing Australia in the pressure charged environment of Venice. We spent hours debating all the names proposed before unanimously selecting an artist to invite to submit along with a curator. In my view you are unlikely to find the right artist through an advert.¹⁸

Meyer indicated that the revisions were in response to requirements from the Venice Biennale authorities highlighting ‘commissioners for each national pavilion must work for the government organisation that oversees the pavilion; in turn, commissioners can hire external curators to organise the artistic displays’.¹⁹

The compliance model favoured by the Australia Council was perceived to lack respect for loyal sponsors and benefactors who had given so much. Debate regarding the over representation of artists who exhibit with private art galleries Anna Schwartz and Roslyn Oxley9 was raised, along with David Walsh, the founder of Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), who welcomed the change citing the prior lack of risk taking in the selection process.²⁰ He remarked that ‘while everyone else in Venice is abseiling, Australia is taking the stairs’.²¹ More discontent followed as the Council of Australian Art Museum Directors wrote to the Australia Council seeking a reversal of the new selection process, suggesting that Tracey Moffatt would have been an unlikely participant under the new set of rules. A more workable option of amending the selection process to include Callum Morton as chair of an at-arm’s-length Board subcommittee was proposed. This led to the 2019 appointment of Angelica Mesiti and curator Juliana Engberg through an ‘open call for expressions of interest … selected by an independent panel of highly respectable art professionals’.²²

The pandemic disrupted the 2021 Biennale seeing it postponed until 2022, when Australia was represented by Marco Fusinato curated by Alexie Glass-Kantor. His installation Desastres explored global tensions through algorithmically selected images presented on an architecturally scaled LCD screen, accompanied by explosive acoustic blasts that wafted from Fusinato’s sustained performance across all 200 days of the event.

In 2023 the Australian Government established Creative Australia (replacing the Australia Council for the Arts) to act as the principal arts investment and advisory body. This new direction aimed to bring together regional issues and encourage gender-diverse, multicultural and First Nations community participation in the arts. The newly established high watermark in Australia’s selection process culminated in 2024 with the Kamilaroi/Bigambul artist Archie Moore and curator Ellie Buttrose receiving the Golden Lion award for the best national pavilion in the Biennale. The work capitalised on the foundations that had been established more than two decades before with purposeful intent to assert Australian Indigenous art and artists front and centre in a national pavilion.²³ The work was appreciated on multiple levels by the international audience and rightly so. Endemic racism was central to the work, alongside a deep mapping of family and ancestral connections. For some, it was the beauty of spatial proportions and Moore’s exceptional placement of text and objects within the black box that elevated the project.

The 2026 Australian representation was going to be a challenge for any selection panel. Not only because of the sheer weight of expectation following the 2024 success but Australian politics in 2025 had also shifted. Numerous global conflicts, the rise in anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and a highly charged federal election in May formed a tense backdrop for the announcement. The selection of artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino was seen as a bold choice given the tensions in the Middle East.²⁴ Sabsabi himself stated ‘There was a sense of joy, an extreme sense of joy, disbelief, shock, to be accepted in that context — as a migrant … as a Muslim’.²⁵ When announced on 7 February 2025, only the selection panel would have been aware of the proposed work and how it would be received in the context of the Biennale the following year. And while the selection process had followed the appropriate protocols resulting in a final list of five proposals from which Sabsabi and Dagostino’s application was selected, a significant risk management failure in the selection process rapidly unravelled after the announcement.

The intervention of Tasmanian liberal senator Claire Chandler in parliament on 13 February, following a series of NewsCorp articles, questioned the appropriateness of Sabsabi to represent Australia. She cited Sabsabi’s previous works Thank You Very Much (2006) and You (2007) that probed the contested spaces of world politics and media.²⁶ In the process she derailed a fair evaluation of Sabsabi’ work and did not provide an opportunity to contextualise two works extracted from decades of practice. That same evening, Creative Australia cancelled the appointment on the basis that the selection posed ‘an unacceptable risk to public support for Australia’s artistic community.’²⁷ 

Much transpired in the following four months: A spotlight on Australian artists propensity to boycott national arts events along pro or anti-Israeli participation or sponsorship;²⁸ greater understanding of how prejudice and the arts play a role in cultural awareness; how non-participation and silence in exhibitions can speak louder than protests;²⁹ a landslide federal election win to the Labour Party; and a review of Creative Australia’s governance, focussed on the decision-making processes and procedures leading up to the selection for the 2026 Venice Biennale. Following the handing down of the Blackhall & Pearl review and a change in the Chair of Creative Australia, on 2 July artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino were reappointed as Australia’s representative for the 2026 Venice Biennale.³⁰

The Venice Biennale has been largely seen through the lens of the Australian artists who have presented work in Venice over the last 71 years, signalling trends in media, demographics, gender, solo or group exhibitions, themes and other touchstones of the visual arts. What has remained virtually invisible is how the Australian international agenda has been created and who has driven the selection process. The Creative Australia Venice Biennale 2026 Governance Review revealed the selection criteria which have been used by industry advisors.³¹ The recent proposals were evaluated against the following criteria: creatively ambitious, engaged with contemporary global conversations, responsive to the architecture of the Australia Pavilion, considerate of the audiences who visit the Venice Biennale across its entire opening period, and demonstrates the timeliness of the presentation.³² These elements were for guidance only, yet clarifying the criteria is useful to understand some of the mechanics behind the selection process. However, how industry advisors are chosen and who they represent, is more opaque. The question remains: Are we selecting the right kinds of artists and curators for Australian representation in the current times?

Naturally the representation of Archie Moore, being chosen as the recipient of the Golden Lion demonstrated something was working in 2024. The challenging circumstances of the 2026 selection will throw significate shadows over future decisions. Yet it may also draw greater clarity from Creative Australia and philanthropic networks that provide support to take Australian artists to Venice, as to who really makes the final call.    

While much of the commentary around art in the Australian pavilion has been celebratory and artists who have been chosen to exhibit in Venice often represent highpoints in Australian contemporary art the selection, management, preparations, duration away from the studio and the artist’s well-being have not always been a cause for celebration. For many artists there is an arduous commitment to preparations (usually a couple of years), accentuated press notoriety, playing celebrity for a few months, time and appearance obligations (government, galleries and donors) mixed with short term fame (but rarely fortune). Representation at Venice tends to go two ways—loved or loathed and those who present face the ultimate artistic VB hangover. With little or no future support following the Biennale being selected can often take its toll—it is for some a ‘poison chalice’.