program 2026
07 August - 20 September
Opening Hours :
Wednesday 1-7pm.
Thurs-Sunday 11-5pm.
Working across painting, video, sound, installation and performance, Khaled approaches art as a communicative and ethical space: a shared language through which complex ideas of belonging, faith, power and collectively can be encountered. His work frequently draws on mysticism, ritual and everyday gestures, unfolding across cycles rather than fixed narratives, and inviting audiences into moments of reflection, resonance and exchange.
Sabsabi describes the exhibition as ‘an opportunity to further personal artistic and creative expressions of the undefined routines and the ability to distill space, time and symbolism into the narrative of life.’
‘Between Suns’ runs concurrently with Sabsabi's representation of Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale, offering Western Australian audiences a rare opportunity to engage deeply with an internationally acclaimed artist's practice on a local scale.
Learn more about the project here
03 August - 25 Sep
This is a unique paid opportunity for an emerging or early career First Nations artist to undertake an 8 week Artist-in-Residency (AIR) at Vessel during our next major exhibition ‘Between Suns’ by Khaled Sabsabi. This program is facilitated by Board Director and independent curator Zali Morgan.
Public programming
22 August - Open Studio 11-4 pm
1 September - First Nations Walyalup Write Night with Centre for Stories
9 September - Stippling Workshop
12 September - Open Studio 11-4 pm
Learn more about the project here
01 September 5.30-8.30 PM
First Nations Walyalup Write Night - Vessel Contemporary and Emma-Lee Maher in collaboration with Centre for Stories
Nestled within Naval Store, this laid back session will explore creative non-fiction and micro memoir, with writing prompts and activities guided by Emma.
Come along to write, yarn and connect with other mob. Bring a story you’re working on, a memory you’ve been holding onto or just come for the cuppa. We’ll provide some finger food to snack on, tea and coffee. Bring a notebook/pad and pens, or laptop to write.
First Nations Write Night is a Centre for Stories project that gives an opportunity for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to come together to develop their writing alongside one another.
All writing styles and forms are welcome – poetry, fiction, memoir, screenplays, etc. We provide prompts based on what people are interested in learning.
Note:
This event is only for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Register here
02 September 7.30-9.30 PM
Vessel Contemporary and Tone List are proud to present an intimate session with composer, coder & electronic musician James Bradbury
Get tickets here
Vessel Contemporary and Tone List are proud to present an intimate session with composer, coder & electronic musician James Bradbury on Wednesday 2 September, from 7.30 - 9 pm. The concert takes place within Between Suns, a large scale, multi-media exhibition of nearly three decades of artworks by Khaled Sabsabi, also open from 1 - 7pm the same day.
We hope that the session allows audiences to engage deeper with the exhibition through another medium. People can dance or relax, close their eyes, and feel lost in cycles that may never resolve.
From James:
“I'll be improvising using my laptop and working with some new pattern generation techniques. It'll sit somewhere between gastric-sub-amorphous-rubber-banding and ultra-pointilistic-techno. I'll also be remixing some older work as I go.I'm keen on the misadventures of machines that can "listen" and which can discover, in their own way, organisations of sound that are surprising and reflexive. I like to make music that is challenging and unrelenting, while also exploring liminal textures and forms. Ideally my computer sounds like a computer.”
Bio:
James Bradbury is a creative-coder and sound artist from Boorloo/Perth, active in Tone List's program since 2016. In the last few years, he has been interested in building digital tools for devising musical structures and exploring pattern generation. He has worked with the Fluid Corpus Manipulation project, released solo works on Superpang and tokinogake, and developed software with Rian Treanor & Mark Fell. He is currently a Lecturer of Music at the University of Western Australia.
https://jamesbradbury.net/
Get tickets here
13 September 10 am - 12
‘What’s Art For?’ in collaboration with Make/Shift Festival
Propelled by Khaled Sabsabi's Between Suns exhibition at Vessel Contemporary, this session explores the essential role of the arts in a functioning democracy and an active, healthy society.
Join us for a lively Sunday morning session with a panel of creatives and community-builders who will make the case for investing money, time, and energy into the arts at a moment when it feels there are more urgent items on the agenda - curated and hosted by Kate Hulett.
Then, we invite you to put art through its paces on a playful tour of all the vital parts we forget art holds in our lives, facilitated by Aden Date. Art can be a teacher, a balm, a rebel, a portal, a lighthouse, a looking glass… come see what’s possible when we take it just seriously enough.
Learn more and get tickets here
07 August 6-8 pm
Vessel presents Khaled Sabsabi's exhibition ‘Between Suns’ curated by Mikala Tai, showcasing works spanning 1998-2026. Offering local audiences to engage with Australia’s representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale
The exhibition invites audiences into Khaled's long-term process and enquires into mysticism, fate, and coincidence, ideas that inspire and hold us together as humans. Sabsabi brings people together in immersive and engaging experiences, to reflect on art’s unique and powerful role in supporting the community through times of uncertainty. Through his work, Sabsabi explores human collectiveness and the quest for coexistence, inviting audiences to do the same.
FRIDAY 07 August
6pm-8pm
Doors 6pm
Talk 6.30pm
Free event, registration required via buttion below.
Thanks to our event partners for the ongoing support: City of Fremantle, Otherside Brewing, Willoughby Park and Lightning Minds, Vessel will be running a paid bar for the evening.
Register for the event here
Experience the exhibition and celebrate with live sets from local djs (to be announced soon) , headlined by PEACEFENDER, Khaled Sabsabi himself!
Before becoming one of Australia's leading contemporary artists, Khaled Sabsabi
was making noise as a teenage hip hop producer and DJ in Western Sydney during the 1980s, performing under the name Peacefender. Mixing unlikely influences into a signature "wall of sound," he used music to bring together the area's Turkish and Lebanese youth — a spirit of connection that still runs through his work today. For one night only Peacefender returns to the decks for a rare live set as part of ‘Between Suns’ at Vessel.
SATURDAY 08 August
6pm-late
Tickets $30
Buy Tickets
Thanks to the support from our Community Partner, Freocast we will be broadcasting the sets live on the evening.
Thanks to our event partners for the ongoing support: City of Fremantle, Otherside Brewing, Willoughby Park and Lightning Minds, Vessel will be running a paid bar for the evening.
11 June – 23 July
Know Thy Neighbour: Gestures
Residency with Cara Teusner-Gartland
Design: Kalu Studio
A collaboration with SPACED and Fremantle Buffalo Club
Work In Progress: The project explores Fremantle Buffalo Club, a site known for shared activities and community work, to look at the power of empathy, wellbeing, and connection: a motion in a performance, a charitable act, the muscle memory of billiards stick and dart throwing, and the act of teaching this to a stranger, leaving with a friend. Cara will draw on the Club’s history and interview present members to inform a project that reflects the club’s identity and living history within the broader community of Fremantle.
About the artist:
Cara Teusner-Gartland is a multidisciplinary artist based in Walyalup/Fremantle. Her practice is rooted in community, place, and storytelling. Engaging with painting, drawing, textile, sculpture, installation, performance and sound, Cara documents and builds a holistic familiarity with sites and underlying local narratives. Her process for developing work often involves long dérives, collecting found and recycled materials, interviews, and archival research. Cara completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Curtin University in 2018, majoring in painting. She has worked extensively in gallery and public art installation, both locally and regionally. She has presented work for the Fremantle Biennale and Melville Midwinter Festival, and featured in exhibitions at PS Art Space, Lost Eden Creative, Old Customs House, Lawson Flats, and Goolugatup Heathcote.
Learn more about the project here
Creative workshop with Artist-in-Resident Cara Teusner-Gartland
Join resident Know Thy Neighbour #4 artist Cara Teusner-Gartland at the Naval Store for a drop-in day of craft projects and screen printing!
Cara and members of The Buffalo Community Kitchen will be working on some new patches and T-Shirts, and they invite you to come join them! If you want to give printing a go, they’ll have a screen ready to try. Got your own projects? Bring them along!
We will have trestles, squeegees, an iron, a light table, and some scrap fabric available for printing/sewing.
Register here
Story Time and Lunch at the Buff with Cara Teusner-Gartland
Note:
Location: Fremantle Buffalo Club (downstairs), 54 High St, Fremantle
Raise a glass to what’s been, and what’s to come, and share a meal brought to you by the Buffalo Community Kitchen.
The Kitchen is run by volunteers and donations, if you’d like a meal, pay as you can at the venue: $20 encouraged, $15 concession. Cash accepted. This event is free to register and all donations on the night will go back to the Buffalo Community Kitchen.
Please inform us if you have any dietary requirements, we do our best to cater for everyone.
The venue is wheelchair accessible.
Please register so we can make sure we have enough food.
Register here
We Are Guardians is a dramatic and energetic journey into the daring struggle of Indigenous land-defenders in the Brazilian Amazon that connects ecological balance with environmental activism.
The film is a rich, intimate journey meeting the many people who are living an intricate daily balance in the Amazon basin, one of the world’s most disrupted and threatened regions. We follow Indigenous leader and activist Puyr Tembé and forest guardian Marçal Guajajara as they fight to protect their territories from deforestation, as well as an illegal logger who has no choice but to cut the forest down to feed his family, and a large landowner at the mercy of thousands of invaders and extractive industry. Through intimate, character focused storytelling, the film reveals the many intertwined social and economic issues driving this complicated landscape.
GET TICKETS HERE
Friday, 24- Sun 26 April
‘Organs, Breathes, Salt’ by Jsuk Han
A site-specific sound installation in which the Naval Store becomes a living organ. Acoustic feedback loops are generated and modulated by interconnected systems: real-time Fremantle weather data — wind speed, humidity, temperature and atmospheric pressure — flocking algorithms that govern the collective behaviour of sound across space, and the resonant frequencies of the microphones and the building itself.
Found objects suspended from the ceiling trusses act as speaker units, connected by cables radiating from a central control system. The installation evolves slowly and unpredictably over the exhibition period, accumulating and shifting like salt itself.
‘Organs, Breathes, Salt’ is an outcome from the ongoing Walyalup Fremantle Arts Centre and Incheon Art Platform Artist in Residence reciprocal exchange.
MORE INFO
Wednesday, 01 April 7-9 pm.
About the film
In the mesmerizing experimental film, Maryam Tafakory conjures an archival séance, unpacking the history of Iran’s first-ever women’s newspaper.In 1998, two schoolgirls sent a letter to Iran’s first-ever women’s newspaper. While they waited to be published, they considered making an impossible film. Using citations and image intervention, Razeh-del journeys through parallel histories of war on images of women.
Local speaker
Born in 1998, Yasamin Khadembashi is an Iranian-Australian multidisciplinary artist born and raised in Australia, living and working on Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar (Perth, Western Australia). Working across sculptural painting, installation, textiles, and mixed media, her practice interrogates the political construction of the body through diasporic, queer feminist, and anti-colonial frameworks. Born to Iranian immigrant parents, Khadembashi draws upon cultural inheritance alongside histories of resistance to examine the systems that regulate visibility, autonomy, and belonging.
GET TICKETS HERE