* Endorsed by Arttactic (insider view of the art market) as an Artist to Watch in the Middle Eastern Report June 2010.

* Entire edition 4/6 of In Exile entered the Barjeel Art Foundation (Sheikh Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi) collection in the UAE.click here to see the collection

Steve Sabella: In Exile
By Charlotte Bank
Nafas Art Magazine - Universe in Universe
http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2010/steve_sabella

"...These contorted passageways through his own psyche led the artist to the roots of his wounds and gave him an inkling of the possibility of healing. While the destructiveness of being uprooted was at the center of In Exile, Sabella’s newest works move, release and liberation into the foreground. Euphoria (2010) alludes to the blissful feeling of being freed of mental fetters. This feeling – possibly short-lived, as the artist himself concedes – is expressed in playful-seeming, uprooted trees..."

Artwork on the Front & Back cover of the 6th edition of Contemporary Practices Art Journal. The same artwork sold at the Christie's auction April 27, 2010 for the International Modern and Contemporary Art (Dubai).

DOWNLOAD COVER PDF

DOWNLOAD CHRISTIE'S AUCTION RESULT PDF

Steve Sabella - The Journey of Artistic Interrogation and Introspection
Retrospective Review by Yasmin El Rashidi
Contemporary Practices Journal, VI, 2010

Palestinian-born artist Steve Sabella could well be a younger, more alternative, more artistic version of the late Edward Said. Like the literary exile who lived in an enclave of a world he had created for himself on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, surrounded and consumed and embedded in the construct of texts that deconstructed the reality he struggled with, Sabella is one who lives in an equal state of alienation – confined to an exile that transcends place: London, and rather is contained in the bounds of his mind. A mind that like Said’s did deconstructs only to rebuild again, but in this case, using a terminology of visual narratives.

DOWNLOAD REVIEW PDF

Steve Sabella
Retrospective by Martina Corgnati
Review Contemporary Practices Journal, VI, 2010

From 1997 on, the images, series and projects of Steve Sabella are periscopes drowned in the invisible of human condition, the uncanny and the search for a meaning; an “exile” that starts as physical and contingent and ends becoming mental, a category of the soul that needs an answer, or a series of answers from each one of us; answers that change – evolve during a lifetime. So, Sabella raised the horizon to his own eyelevel: From a contingent one to a universal one, escaping every rhetoric, though not losing his identity as an artist, but on the contrary, conquering it.

DOWNLOAD REVIEW PDF

SETTLEMENT - Six Israelis & One Palestinian
Reviewed by International Gallerie magazine, Feb 2010

Convincing six Israelis to strip for him and stand in their underwear, Sabella creates an artwork that is uncommon in the region as it shifts from ubiquitous views of ‘Nostalgia’. Instead, it engages the viewer in a strong visual debate and thought.

DOWNLOAD REVIEW PDF

Territory in Exile - Exile of Identity
Review by Stéphanie Ravel
L'Agenda Magazine, Jan 2010

Steve Sabella is reworking the image of Palestinian art. Conceptual and psychological, his photomontage series In Exile challenges the traditional approach to the Palestinian question.

DOWNLOAD REVIEW PDF

In Exile & Cecile Elise Sabella
New Vision - Arab Contemporary Art in the 21st Century (Thames & Hudson & TransGlobe Publishing).

One of the most important themes running throughout all of Sabella’s work is the concept of exile, the result of growing up in a divided city such as Jerusalem: ‘As far as I remember I always felt out of place in my city of birth. Alienation was surrounding me. Kamal Boullata [another Jerusalem artist] remarked...how I function like an artist in exile even though I lived in my city of birth. It took me a few years to understand the meaning of his words. I was not “physically” in exile. It was Jerusalem that was exiled and hence...all those who lived in it were in exile.’

DOWNLOAD REVIEW PDF