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..."
Steve Sabella in Exile - Conversation with the Artist
Retrospective Review by Sara Rossino - text in Italian & English
Exhibition Catalogue published by the Metroquadro Gallery in Rivoli, Turin - May, 2010
The first time you find yourself in front of the artworks which make up the In Exile series by Steve Sabella, you have a strange feeling of familiarity. Not with regards to the places which are featured in the images, fragments of a subjective reality which is alien to the viewer, details of the everyday London life which the artist has been living with his family for the past three years since he left the Old City of Jerusalem. These shards of captured memories, deconstructed and reconstructed, are intimate to Sabella because they belong to his daily dimension, but are distant from the spectator, lacking a familiar or recognizable reference, extracted from an anonymous anywhere.
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Reflections on Palestine - THE EMPTY QUARTER DUBAI
Nyree Barrett
Time Out Dubai, 25/3/2010
HIS MESSAGE IN A NUTSHELL: ‘Alienation is the new world syndrome.’ Steve Sabella’s images are without horizon: the abstract landscapes layer many images of one window over each other hundreds or thousands of times. It took Sabella a year to create five pieces using this process, and the result is a disorientating but visually arresting new landscape with no sky and no respite.
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Steve Sabella
Retrospective review 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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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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SETTLEMENT
by Bina Sarkar
International Gallerie magazine, Issue 25, 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.
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Territory in Exile - Exile of Identity
In Exile reviewed by Stephanie Ravel
L'Agenda Magazine, Jan 2010
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.
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2009
Steve Sabella
In Exile & Cecile Elise Sabella reviewed in 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.’
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Reconstructing Deconstruction
In Exile reviewed by Gerhard Charles Rump
Contemporary Art Practices Journal, Vol. V, 2009
Sabella serializes different single images to form a kind of overall structured image, a super-image. The function of the super-image is broader and bigger than that of the individual images it is composed of. His metaphor of the city (of Jerusalem) is that of windows or window-fronts or parts of house- facades. There is light coming from within, and the tilting and mirroring (in symmetries) adds dynamism to the super-image thus created
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Von Angesicht zu Angesicht (Face to Face)
Settlement – Six Israelis & One Palestinian, Review by Doerthe Engelcke
Zenith Magazine, Jan 2009
Der Besucher betritt den Raum und sieht sich sechs lebensgrossen Fotografien von Israelis in Unterhosen gegenueber. Dreht er sich um, blickt er in das Gesicht des Kuenstlers selbst: Steve Sabella. Auch in Unterhose. Automatisch solidarisiert sich der Betrachter mit einer Seite, in einem unbewussten Prozess. Die Gegenueberstellung kreiert einen Spiegeleffekt und hinterfragt die Identitaet beider Parteien. “Sechs Israelis formen einen Koerper, und mein Abbild wird gedacklich in sechs Koerper zersetzt”, erklaert Sabella
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Jerusalem in the Heart Two Urban Artists in Exile
Kamal Boullata in Palestinian Art (Saqi Books 2009)
And yet, it is in Sabella's conscious avoidance of photographing Jerusalem that the visual artist has managed to recreate the universality of a place with which he identifies. In that respect, his search for his true self may be likened to those monks who, drawn by Jerusalem, came from distant lands only to spend the rest of their lives in bare and desolate landscapes. Only there could Sabella find a Jerusalem where he might breathe fresh air.
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2007
Eyes Infinite Films, USA. Beyond Blue & Grey. The film consists of five episodes. Two of them were about Jerusalem in Exile (2006) and Kan Yama Kan (2005) artworks respectively.
See Some Short Clips Here
Jerusalem in Exile - click here
Kan Yama Kan - click here |