Steve Sabella In Exile. Deconstruction Art & States of Mind

Having realized that Sabella lives in what he refers to as "mental exile", he is now trying to give a visual form to the 'state of mind' of living in this exile. Sabella is deconstructing his surroundings and rebuilding them by assembling hundreds of images together until a 'new form' or 'impossible reality' is created.

This project was directly related to Sabella's conception that his city of birth Jerusalem does not exist (jerusalem in exile 2006) and hence this explained his state of alienation. Furthermore, traces of this project can be seen in other projects such as Cecile Elise Sabella (2008) where he experiences the duality of exile, Mentalopia (2007) where people reside in foreign spaces, Exit (2006), where Sabella experiences what he terms 'exilic landscapes' and in much earlier works which he created in the last decade such as End of Days (2003), where Sabella penetrates his psyche.

in exile

2008

136/125 cm

limited edition of 6 + 2 AP

lambda prints mounted on aluminum

with a 5 cm aluminum edge

the state of mind of living in exile. Steve Sabella

"I like Steve's use of the photographic surface to produce a kind of visual vertigo. His images flatten and extend the plane of the photographic medium transforming their representational quality to endless data."

Clare Grafik, curator of the Photographers Gallery London

"The keywords for my work are ‘disorientation’ and ‘dislocation’. The latter should be understood in terms of disorder, disturbance and confusion. Living in a constant state of ‘mental exile’, I have become more conscious that the state of fragmentation and alienation I have been going through can never turn into a whole or take me back to a fixed point of ‘origin’.

Consequently, the work is showing 'states of mind’. I am assembling my own constructions—creating a new structure or a new ‘impossible reality’ of common shapes and forms that exist in my immediate monotonous surroundings. However, I am not sure whether my ambivalent reconstructions are making the world or my perception of it any simpler."

Steve Sabella

Steve Sabella, originally from the Old City of Jerusalem and now living in London, uses a complex technique of photomontage to investigate his own condition of “mental exile”. His project “In Exile” (2008) draws the viewer into images of multiple perspectives that turn even the simplest view into disturbing and disorienting landscapes. He seeks to deconstruct the familiar in order to recompose it and thus create a new reality through compositions that correspond to the experience of living in constant exile.

Charlotte Bank, curator

“There are still people who perceive Palestinian art in a militant and national way.” A leading figure of the new wave of Palestinian artists, 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. On the occasion of the exhibition Palestine, Creativity In All Its States, showing until Feb 10th at the Bahrain National Museum, Steve Sabella offers l’Agenda’s readers the key to viewing contemporary Palestinian art through a different lens.

Stephanie Ravel , writer for L'Agenda Magazine (English translation by May Ashour) FULL ARTICLE PDF

One of the works that moved me was by Steve Sabella, titled In Exile (2008), in which he had taken a seemingly dull picture of the windows facing his own apartment building in an ordinary London neighborhood and juxtaposed endless inverted reproductions of it, creating a visual illusion of movement and infinity through the classical techniques of geometrical repetition, symmetry and complementarity that are associated with the arabesque form. Exile can be quite uneventful, monotonous and redundant, a sort of continuous movement without every getting anywhere. There is nothing heroic about being just another tenant in a shapeless apartment building, no matter how tragic the events that led to you living there are. The sense of solitude, alienation and powerlessness the work expressed left me with a knot in my stomach, especially when I look outside my own window and see the long lines of eerily similar houses, clones really, that make an ordinary Canadian suburban neighborhood.

Yara El-Ghadban - exhibition visitor at the Institut du Monde Arabe

exhibition view of in exile artwork in Rivoli

This work has been reviewed in New Vision: Arab Contemporary Art in the 21st Century (Thames & Hudson). By Hossein Amirsadeghi, Nada Shabout & Salwa Mikdadi.

DOWNLOAD Christie's Launch in Oct. 2009. PDF

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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