Organised confusion

'Organised confusion' explores heightened states of consciousness and fanaticism. Two of the video channels show supporters of the Western Sydney Wanderers football team, known as the Red and Black Bloc, gathered en masse to engage in the spectacle of sportsmanship. Together, this diverse crowd shares a communal experience that is by turns highly charged and uneventful. In dialogue with these immersive projections, Sabsabi presents a sequence of black and white videos that show the Javanese dancer Agung Gunawan performing a slow and introspective dance, evoking a state of spiritual transcendence. As the scholar Chari Larsson has noted, the work revolves around 'a series of strong dichotomies: public and private, collective and individual, secular and religious'[1], which reveal the disparate ways in which ritual and belief find expression across cultures.

1. Chari Larson, 'Multitude, solitude: Khaled Sabsabi's 'crowds' in Di'van| A journal of accounts, Issue 1, Dec 2016, December 2016, p122