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Steve Sabella … Liberating The Imagination From The Poisons of The Occupation
Interview with Asmaa’ Azaizeh
Arab48.com
Sept. 2020
I have created art in the last months I usually achieve in five years. With every finished project, I gained more clarity. In addition to Everland, Endless, A Short Story, and The Sound of Jerusalem, I am wrapping up Palestine UNSETTLED, a liberating photo journey to Palestine that once was, to the Palestine that thrives in our spirit. Palestine UNSETTLED is a voyage between image and imagination by looking directly at reality. The visuals float between painting and photography, revealing layers of history, where it becomes felt how the Palestinian culture was embroidered together by people who embrace life.
Read Online (Arabic)
The Era of essence, Imagination and Hard Work’: Interview with Palestinian Artist Steve Sabella
Interview with Naima Morelli
Middle East Monitor
April 5, 2020
For multimedia artist Steve Sabella, these hard times require us to access the potential of our imagination in order to conjure up our collective future. His works of art reflecting the hardships of the Palestinians become universal metaphors for global rebirth. “We are in the era of something new,” says the Palestinian artist. “Of change, opportunity, creativity, imagination. So we must bid farewell to the age of war and hatred. In the post-coronavirus apocalypse, any leader in the world who does not endorse pure awareness to protect the planet first, followed by equal welfare for all its citizens, will eventually have no chance.” When the Covid-19 crisis hit, the artist was about to put up for auction his six metre-wide photographic triptych called “No Man’s Land” at Sotheby’s, donating all of the proceeds to Birzeit’s Palestinian Museum Education Programme.
Read the full interview published in Al Qattan Website (English)
Read the full interview published in Al Qattan Website (Arabic)
Beyond Finitude: Steve Sabella’s 38 Days of Re-Collection
Fragments From Our Beautiful Future
By T.J. Demos
May 18, 2017
With 38 Days of Re-Collection, we glimpse scenes of aesthetic plenitude, just beyond reach. Beyond reach because the images d flattened, obscured, fragmented, blurred and discolored. Their supports are irregular, each being singular, being ripped from walls, ripped from time, opening layers of the past. They are portals to the past, peeled-away strata, archaeological traces.
order book on Kerber Verlag website
An Aesthetics of Dis/Placement: Steve Sabella’s 38 Days of Re-Collection
Fragments From Our Beautiful Future
By Ella Shohat
May 18, 2017
Here the map becomes a signifier without a referent, a simulacrum of simulacra, a token of powerlessness and the arbitrary nature of maps. In a kind of premonition about the overpowering force of maps, the scraped fragment evokes both roots and routes… A rich intersectional past of Jerusalem, with its shared aesthetic of house and home by neighbors belonging to various religious and ethnic communities, is conjured up through Sabella’s fragments. Within a multi-chronotopic perspective, the series takes the viewer on an imaginary return to a disappeared time and place. But by actively joining fragments from different houses, the artwork remixes the old fragments into new neighboring aesthetic units. From the remains, new possibilities are composed. Perhaps only through such acts of vivid recollection of places/times, of “plurilog,” can a reimagined conviviality be pieced together anew.
Collecting Notes to and for the Future
Fragments From Our Beautiful Future
By Nat Muller
May 18, 2017
Moreover, focusing on the house’s contents rather than its outward facade suggests that we as viewers become privy to that which is usually kept from sight, is untold and unseen. Palestinian grief and loss haunts these occupied houses. Subtly Sabella unearths this. His strategy is a paradoxical one though, and in its own terms, one of displacement… Though this is a defiant gesture against erasure, it also shows the difficulty of Palestinian memory being preserved at the locus delicti. Sabella has to first transform these shards of wall into objects of the past and undo them from their current ontology as functioning walls. In fact, by peeling the plaster off the wall, he cuts short their timeline. No longer do they stand witness to history; now they have become history. It is a reversed archaeology of sorts.
The Parachute Paradox Unrolls Palestinian Artist Steve Sabella’s Quest for a Sense of Identity
The National (UAE) – Arts & Culture section
By Joseph Dana
March 22, 2017
The number of books about Israel and Palestine published every year can feel oppressive to the average reader. Coupled with the constant stream of news, it is clear that there is untappable desire for discussion about the conflict. Yet, new books tend follow the same patterns in terms of approach, construction and content. An in-depth history of one stage of the conflict, a compelling argument to achieve peace or, perhaps, a convincing strategy to challenge the status quo. On rare occasions, an original narrative of the conflict, imbued with honesty and sensitivity, is published.
View on The National
Re-constructing Dasein: The Works of Steve Sabella
Institute for Middle East Understanding
By Charlotte Bank
March 28, 2016
2013 brought another change to Steve Sabella’s work. A visit to Bahrain to realize a work commissioned by the National Museum of Bahrain served as the spark for him to engage with his visual environment in a novel way… The resulting project Sinopia (2014) is markedly different from the earlier works; it abounds with a multitude of colors and forms, isolated individual components of images, abstract forms taken from the walls of houses as well as familiar sights such as satellite dishes, a kaleidoscope of the stunning landscapes and city views of Bahrain.
This new way of carefully dissecting the image appears almost surgical, and is in Sabella’s own words a reaction to what he calls people’s, “obsession with trying to rationalize photography’s indexical relationship to reality.” Steve Sabella seems to ask us to go further than this and investigate the photographic medium as the relationship between the image and the reality it creates, rather than reality as it purportedly depicts.
Perturbed Visions
Walls and Margins exhibition catalogue
By Nat Muller
November 2015
Metamorphosis (2012)… shows segments of the Separation Wall multiplied in a dizzying motif. There is no top or bottom here, no sky or ground, the wall is reduced to pure pattern that confuses our way of looking… the pattern appears hermetic, it is frayed at the edges and hints at a transitional process. History has taught us that if walls can be put up, they can also be knocked down.
In the Wake of the Poetic
By Najat Rahman
Syracuse University Press
2015
In Steve Sabella’s haunting work In Exile, images recurrently depict a somber but meticulously constructed exile. Each image seems to repeat and proliferate images of houses or apartments, as if they are settlements or homes artificially constructed and imposed. The images are imbued with the dark colors blue and gray, brown and black, as we see in the image In Exile 1. In In Exile 2 spaces are surrounded with barbed wired. As Sabella once proclaimed, “I stitch my wounds with barbed wire.” The “reconstitution” of self is paradoxically one of violent suturing that has not been able to rid reality of barbed wires, at home or in exile, but remains liberatory. With light emanating from the inside of these interiors at night, the images are not without a sense of hope. Despite the dark gray, blue, and black, the flitter of interior light suggests movement nonetheless, perhaps a breakthrough from all limitations.
The Harrowed Hands of Palestine
Electronic Intifada
By Sarah Irving
November 2, 2015
Later sequences of work such as “In Exile” (2008), “In Transition” (2010), “Euphoria” (2010), “and “Sinopia” (2014) document Sabella’s increasing fascination with abstracting his photographs, layering and repeating images to create atmospheric but less immediately readable pieces. Some involve direct and challenging imagery — razor wire and brutal metal shapes — while others have a much more tender, personal feel. The abstractness, though, creates even here a sense of distance, as if a question is being posed. The viewer is also challenged by the complex relationship of aesthetic with content. In abstracting his images, Sabella makes barbed wire and the harsh metal technologies of exclusion and social violence somehow beautiful. Where do aesthetics and ethics meet in such a picture?
PDF
view on the Electronic Intifada
Steve Sabella – Photography 1997 – 2014
Journal for Palestine Studies
By Dorothea Schoene
Summer 2015
When Boullata encountered the photographer’s early work in 2002 for the first time, Sabella was still into realistic portrayals of the local landscape, with a good eye for meaningful and symbolically charged details. By 2007, he had created his first abstract series, which he entitled In Exile. Two years after leaving his home city and country, the artist had given his sentiment of estrangement and alienation a powerful visual translation. While there was no focal point in these new series, the clear attempt to structure and compose as if to bring order into a photographic world still remained, which was and is so closely linked to Sabella’s own biography.
Steve Sabella: Creative Interpretation or Visual Deconstruction?
Tribe
By Madeline Yale Preston
2015
Sabella moves beyond the surface of Bahrain to dismantle and reassemble his insights, building associations between diverse variables to construct new realities. The four works appear almost painted and question one’s perception of Bahrain as a location as well as presuppositions about the medium of photography itself.
view on Tribe website
Steve Sabella, “My Art Is Not About Palestine! It’s About My Life.”
Palestine Square – The Blog of the Institute for Palestine Studies
By Khelil Bouarrouj
March 6, 2015
The photographic lens has been Sabella’s tool, and in adopting it, he has sought to photograph his own understanding of the world. Although Sabella took his first photograph at age 12, he theorized in our interview, “Is the visual manifestation the starting point in art?” The process of thinking about the photograph started long before – “since forever.” Throughout his life he has sought to visualize his own development and liberation and has spoken previously of the need for “visual liberation” of the Arab image.
Shifting Sands: Photography and Beyond
Art+Auction
By Trent Morse
March 2015
Through his art, Sabella grapples with life in exile, with its distorting and destructive consequences. His is an art of understanding; it is poetic and suppresses neither expulsion nor salvation.
Steve Sabella: Independence
Afterimage – Volume 42, Number 5
By Seth Thompson
January/February 2015
Independence, which conjures up notions of emancipation and liberation, is fitting in regard to both the images’ content and technical departure. In a 2014 interview with Evrim Altug, Sabella stated, “In many ways, a state of surrender has invaded the consciousness of Palestinians in the never ending Israeli occupation, with the exception of the people in the Gaza Strip. It is the role of the individual to stand up and free him or herself from the new form of colonization that most people are unaware of, the colonization of the imagination.” Perhaps this series is evidence that Sabella has granted himself the freedom that he suggests.
PDF
view on the Afterimage website
A Drift
Harper’s Bazaar Arabia
By Rebecca Anne Proctor
January/February 2015
As the artist himself shares. ‘Once we are locked inside the images of ourselves, these images take on a life of their own… [They] often outlast us and can replace us as the ‘remembered reality.’ lt has taken time for Sabella to free himself from the mental torments of exile and displacement. Those familiar with his work will remember his series ‘In Exile’ (2008) when this was first apparent. Here we witnessed the initial visualisation of his movement into freedom through images whereby the artist destroyed and assembled symbols of entry and exile…. These pieces challenge the photographic image of Palestine as do his new works in ‘Independence’.
New Constellations for Steve Sabella
Canvas
January 2015
It was a busy year for Berlin-based Palestinian artist Steve Sabella, with 2014 seeing four exhibitions and a monograph (Steve Sabella: Photography 1997–2014 by Hatje Cantz)… Layers (21 September–21 October) at CAP Kuwait featured the new series Independence (2013) and 38 Days Of Re-Collection (2014) alongside Metamorphosis (2012) and Exit (2006) alongside a book launch on the opening night.
Steve Sabella – Meem Gallery
Artforum – Critic’s Picks
By Kevin Jones
November 2014
If Steve Sabella’s 2013 series “Independence” were music, it would be trip-hop—a suave, steady beat wrapped in a sullen, ethereal pall, at once spirited and weighty… The ambivalent, distended bodies depicted are themselves textured by scales of light and shown as if in free fall or blurred by nebulous fluid.
Palestinian Photographer Steve Sabella Declares Independence through Mental Images – Book Review
Art Radar
By Lisa Pollman
September 12, 2014
Throughout the book, Sabella’s images take us from one world to another. His fresh, early work leads to the pivotal series “Six Israelis and One Palestinian” and “Metamorphosis”, ending with the painterly, rich series “38 days of re-collection” and “Sinopia”. Sabella’s monograph stands as one of the very few records for those interested in learning more about contemporary art and artists from the Middle East to peruse and study.
Steve Sabella: Insights into the Nature of Identity and Visual Reality
Cedar Wings Magazine
August 2014
Sabella is one of those rare artists who question not only the world but also themselves. The making of his artistic images is linked to the evolution of his self-image. Throughout his work, he has been on a quest to deconstruct and defy labels, to rebuild his identity, taking the risk of feeling like a stranger to oneself, uprooting himself only to later grow roots all over the world. Is cultural fragmentation a state of permanent exile, or is it an opportunity to recreate one’s mental surroundings – and recreate reality itself? As Sabella writes, “I find myself exploring the genealogy of the image and asking what existed first: the image or the world?”
Liberation as a State of Mind
Gulf News
By Jyoti Kalsi
May 7, 2014
Berlin-based Palestinian artist Steve Sabella is known for his large-scale, abstract and sharp photographs. But his latest show in Dubai, “Independence”, is different. The photographs in this series are much smaller and have a diffused, dreamlike quality. They feature two anonymous figures suspended in a dark space. The figures seem peaceful yet unsettled; connected yet independent. They look almost like X-ray images, and a closer look reveals distortions and broken bones in the bodies.
Free-Falling Into the Future
Independence Exhibition Catalogue
Meem Gallery, Dubai
By Madeline Yale Preston
2014
Unlike the aforementioned fractured constellations, Independence is viscerally and deceptively whole. It is a new visual experience, wherein the only borders lie on the images’ edges themselves, and the outlines of the figures contained within them appear intact…
As theorist Roland Barthes implied, every photograph is of a dead moment.Whether we philosophically perceive a photograph to be of an experience that is ‘real’ or ‘imagined’, it is a tangible reproduction, which is by nature a cunning distortion. A photograph is a ghost of the image that once was, which is a ghost of the real. Even in the absence of the information before it, the camera still registers light on the surface substrate, effectively ‘inventing’ information, subjectively characterizing matter. If a photograph has the ability to define how reality is represented in the form of an image, Independence can be read as a critique of the slippages between life and what is constructed in the mind.
view entire catalogue
view exhibition on the Meem Gallery website
In Conversation with Steve Sabella
Independence Exhibition Catalogue
Meem Gallery, Dubai
By Madeline Yale Preston
2014
Madeline Yale Preston: Several of your series’ titles – In Exile, Metamorphosis, Euphoria, Beyond Euphoria, to name a few – suggest states of being that are interconnected in sum. One interpretation is that these ‘states’ are autobiographical, referring to your own evolutionary psychological framework, largely in response to living in occupied Jerusalem for the majority of your life. The title Independence – also a state of being – is a leading one. What is it independence from?
Steve Sabella: In my catalogue essay for the Archaeology of the Future exhibition in Verona (October 2014), I ask whether we can break ourselves free from our image. In my work I explore decoding fixed systems that are constantly at work to entrap people in bordered spaces. Over time this investigation led me to see the bigger picture. Each series I have created began with a search of how to explore and exit the state of mind I was living in. I transformed this state into a visual dilemma or a question, which, once solved, would lead me to a new state with a new visual challenge. Looking back at my work, I see that I was unfolding visual palimpsests that explore the multiple layers of my past, and the influence perception had on my ‘reality’. Today my images gain their independence from my narrative. The narrative might still be there, but it will unfold itself in a different way. There are hidden layers in images that change perception all the time. It is time to engage further in the process of looking, where meaning resides only in the mind of the viewer.
An Artist Examines the Israel-Palestine Conflict in Dark, Ambiguous Photographs
Artsy Editorial
By Stephen Dillon
2014
There is beauty in the distortions of their bodies in the refracted water, but they are also made to appear fractured and incomplete by the warping ripples. Many of the images are oriented vertically, so that bodies appear to be falling or flying. In one, a woman reaches upward, while another ambiguous person—they are so obscured that we cannot be sure of their age or gender—reaches down to them through the inky blackness. They seem peaceful, but nonetheless straining for connection.
Seeing and Unseeing Through Recreational Purpose
Recreational Purpose Exhibition Catalogue
Bahrain National Museum
By Nat Muller
2014
Sabella’s compositions veer from the surreal depictions of mirrored cityscapes and the iconic 400-year old Tree of Life, to highly deconstructed energetic painterly collages reminiscent of cubist and fauvist paintings. In one collage, the compiled facades of buildings make up a completely novel cubist and chaotic cityscape, with only windows, lanterns and satellite dishes as recognisable elements. It is as if Sabella has stripped his Bahraini images of their specificity in order to construct a composite image with layer upon layer of information.
Steve Sabella – Photography 1997-2014
Monograph
By Hubertus Von Amelunxen
2014
Were metaphor not so misleading, I would say that Sabella paints with photography. The individual photograph takes on meaning only as material and as a citation of a reality, so as to then be bound into a structural mesh of forms. The material enables the theme to resound, gives the note, so to speak, to then be varied in different correlations. The photograph’s objective impression, evident only upon closer scrutiny, is not revoked by the painterly gesture. On the contrary, the images make their impact through a gaze that cannot be correlated, cannot be attributed to something seen…
These images contain only what was not before and what now corresponds to a becoming that is not based on its past. The structural dismantling of the photographic gaze begun in the In Exile cycle has an inherent hopelessness that takes Steve Sabella not away from photography but toward abstraction through a formal idiom of his own. His images develop into arabesques, intertwining counterpoints, structural images, fabrics interwoven with deductions from the passings of time, planes on which a shattered reality is laid.”
Foreword
Steve Sabella – Photography 1997-2014
By Kamal Boullata
2014
There are no symmetries in Sabella’s arabesques, just as there are no symmetries in the two worlds he lives in. In his photography it is metaphor that replaces the role of symmetry in the traditional arabesque. In the cubistic nature of his vision it is between the “here” he moved to and the “there” he came from that his metaphors manifest what the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard called “the dialectics of outside and inside.” It is no wonder that it was out of photographing fenestrations, barriers, brick walls, and skies that Sabella entered into his world of abstraction.
view monograph
order on Hatje Cantz website
Steve Sabella: An Encounter
Archeology of the Future Exhibition Catalogue
The International Center of Photography Scavi Scaligeri in Verona
By Karin Adrian von Roques
2014
Brought into the light, they show an unexpected result. The newly created objects are like found pieces of a time that tells of the many-faceted past that exists in our present and yet cannot be pinned down to any specific era. “With those tile-like structure images, people think at first that these are found objects, almost archeological artifacts – Steve explains – but you and I know that they are an illusion.”
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watch exhibition teaser
Discoveries of a Mental Journey
Archeology of the Future Exhibition Catalogue
The International Center of Photography Scavi Scaligeri in Verona
By Beatrice Benedetti
2014
Steve’s trip, it could be said, was simply an expedition, with discoveries and restoration, the only difference being that the key value of the objects he found is not the rediscovery of a lost time, but rather the discovery of an original idea that is preserved for the days to come.
Beyond Palestine
Layers Exhibition Catalogue
Contemporary Art Platform (CAP), Kuwait
By Malu Halasa
2014
Some fragments show decorative Roman and Mediterranean motifs from tiled floors, or a blurred outline of an old fashioned Palestinian nuclear family. There are ghostly images of a traditional kitchen, the lone teakettle or clusterings of cutlery. All of the fragments attest to the lives lived, lost and forgotten within those spaces. This is a highly charged emotional work, which has at its essence time travel: exile and return, reconstruction of homeland and the past, but above all, the impermanence of the human condition.
Review: Fragments
Harper’s Bazaar Art Arabia
By Sheyma Buali
July/August 2014
In 38 Days, Sabella does not simply construct images but creates relics from his own imagination based on a very personal perception of place. These abstract souvenirs evoke notions of home and alienation and the friction between perceived and physical distance.
Preserving the Image
Canvas Magazine
By Robin Mann
July/August 2014
It is striking how much the work is reminiscent of a continent itself. Jagged edges of peeled paint define the end of the snapshot, cut off listlessly and creating its own border. Interweaving layers of varying faded oil tones and plaster applied to the Jerusalem city walls from which it is peeled, creating a lattice of colour, gradations of brown through green. We are nonetheless looking at a black-and-white image.
Image as witness – Archeology of the past: Interview with Steve Sabella
Contemporary Practices – Volume XIV
By Wafa Gabsi
2014
We often associate success in archeological research with the discovery of an ancient fragment that would add to our understanding of the past. For example, we often relate to paintings on cave walls in terms of how they decode the life structure of the past. But what was their essence––what was their position in the visual puzzle in tracing and solving the history of the image? By asking these questions we could research the visual history of the world––a history that traces back to the origin of the image and the question of who existed first: the image or the world? Ironically, it was through exile that I was able to dig deeper into the relationship between images. The only way out was by altering my consciousness, or simply resorting to imagination to build new structures. There is no truth out there, but many variations, interpretations and constructions of it. I was able to live in a new reality that I had revealed to myself.
The Last Word
Canvas
November 2013
Steve Sabella’s Ecdysis: The Catharsis of Metamorphosis
Contemporary Practices – Volume XI
By Dorothea Schoene
2012
The way I understand metamorphosis is that the rebirth will still remember or carry with it some burdens of the past, given that there is no DNA change. I do perceive my life in a more mature way now.
Stages of Transition. Visualizing Exile in the Work of Steve Sabella
Afterimage – Volume 39, Number 6
By Dorothea Schoene
2012
Sabella’s work, then, almost literally serves as an illustration for Edward Said’s seminal essay on the subject. In “Reflections on Exile” (2000), Said argues that critical insight and perception of exile produce a “pleasure” that may surmount the “grimness of outlook” of those actually experiencing exile. This does not mean, however, a satisfaction with the situation: “Exile is never the state of being satisfied, placid, or secure.”
Steve Sabella – I am From Jerusalem
Euphoria and Beyond Exhibition Catalogue
The Empty Quarter, Dubai
By Christa Paula
2011
Beyond Euphoria relishes in a freedom never seen before in Sabella’s oeuvre, a freedom where possibilities are limitless and new fictional spaces beckon to be explored.
Steve Sabella in Conversation with Sara Rossino
The Changing Room Exhibition Catalogue, Curated by Aida Eltorie
By Sara Rossino
2011
While working on Euphoria I felt that there was something beyond, and this is when Beyond Euphoria came to light. The form had to look more abstract. The work might resemble paintings but this was never the goal. In fact, what makes it stand out is probably when people realize that the collage is made up of photographic images. That is, the work resorts to photography to achieve its effect. Photography has that unique artistic quality that can create an immediate connection with the viewer. It has to do with the image that has an uncanny resemblance with the world. After years of working with the photographic medium, it seems that my images lost that uncanny resemblance and are now pushing for a newer understanding of the exhausted photographic image. My images are constructions of a fictional world or space. They are starting to obtain their power from the adjacent cut fragments that are giving them a new form and identity.
Exodus and Back
Canvas
By Myrna Ayad
2011
It then seems as though Sabella’s In Transition hit the nail right on the head and snowballed into a mental ecstasy. in the same week that he shot images for In Transition, came Euphoria, “like an explosion!” here, the images take on a chromosomal quality; the apparent veins and arteries clearly connect to one another and Sabella’s dna is unmistakably lucid.
Euphoria and Beyond
Zakharif
By Charlotte Bank
May 13, 2011
This new-found freedom is further explored in Beyond Euphoria, the series Sabella was working on when demonstrations erupted in Tunisia and Egypt. “Beyond Euphoria” invites the viewer into multi-layered landscapes, indefinable, yet attractive, stretching toward a far horizon.
Steve Sabella: In Exile
Nafas Art Magazine – Universe in Universe
By Charlotte Bank
July 2010
“…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
Exhibition Catalogue, Metroquadro Gallery, Turin
By Sara Rossino
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.
Steve Sabella
Contemporary Practices
By Martina Corgnati
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.
Steve Sabella – The Journey of Artistic Interrogation and Introspection
By Yasmin El Rashidi
Contemporary Practices Journal
Volume 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.
Reconstructing Deconstruction
By Gerhard Charles Rump
Contemporary Art Practices Journal
Volume 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.
New Vision: Arab Contemporary Art in the 21st Century
Thames & Hudson
By Hossein Amirsadeghi, Nada Shabout & Salwa Mikdadi
2009
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.’
Christie’s Book Launch – October 2009
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Face to Face
Zenith Magazine
By Doerthe Engelcke
2009
In terms of numbers 6:1, what do they signify?
The work is highly coded. One of the obvious symbols is the number 6 which might remind people of the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust.
More complicated though is the question of survival that haunts Israelis and Palestinians. The installation, as a reminder entails the printing of life size images of six Israelis on one side and the
image of the Palestinian directly opposite and facing them. One of the participating Israelis indicated that people might perceive the work as a shooting range. The installation will create a visual unresolved tension (especially because of the uneven number) that questions survival aspects between Palestinians and Israelis.
The numbers might also trigger the concept of the collective that shapes the region, where nations are treated collectively rather than taking into account the individuality of people.
PDF (English)
PDF (German)
Steve Sabella: Blurring the Lines
Haaretz
By Danny Rubenstein Haaretz
2005
Haaretz Why is this interesting? Because Steve, a professional photographer who works for the various United Nations agencies in the territories, visited Gaza a few weeks ago together with an Australian woman journalist who works with him in order to prepare a report for an official UN magazine under the heading “A Look at Gaza.” As they were passing near the Gaza port, they were halted by a group of young armed men. They were abducted and taken to a house down the road beyond the Shati refugee camp.
Steve Sabella … Liberating The Imagination From The Poisons of The Occupation
Interview with Asmaa’ Azaizeh
Arab48.com
Sept. 2020
لا يمكن، عند النظر في أعمال الفنّان ستيف سابيلا، تحييد القيمة البصريّة الّتي تحملها عن الرؤية الفكريّة والفلسفيّة، الّتي تتكوّن على شكل أسئلة أو إجابات يظلّ البصر – أو للدقّة – المخيّلة البصريّة، الوحيدة القادرة على تمثيلها. لكنّ سابيلا يتعاطى مع هذه المخيّلة من حيث إنّها سلسلة من العلائق الّتي تشنقنا بعدد لانهائيّ من الأشياء، حال انزلقنا من بطن الحياة، وما تجاربنا أو تجاربه الفكريّة والفنّيّة إلّا محاولات إثر محاولات في تحرير نفسه من هذه العلائق.
سابيلا، المولود في مدينة ينافس فيها الواقع أجود مخيّلة، يعتبر
القدس عاصمة مخيّلته الشخصيّة. ومن حيث هي لم تعد لديه جذرًا أو منفًى بمعناهما المفهوم سياسيًّا، ستظلّ تشكّل موضوعًا للبحث والتجربة في أعماله. نجد آخرها أعمال كولاج يستخدم فيها سابيلا صورًا تاريخيّة للقدس، سيشعر الناظر أمامها بحيل المكان، وتساؤلات عن الحقيقة أو الوهم لِما يراه. وهي خيوط ومساحات برزخيّة يظلّ الكثير من أعماله الفنّيّة يقف عندها، يظلّ المتلقّي مضطربًا عندها وحاملًا حيرة بصريّة وفكريّة مثيرة.
Read Online (Arabic)
The Era of essence, Imagination and Hard Work’: Interview with Palestinian Artist Steve Sabella
Interview with Naima Morelli
Middle East Monitor
April 5, 2020
For multimedia artist Steve Sabella, these hard times require us to access the potential of our imagination in order to conjure up our collective future. His works of art reflecting the hardships of the Palestinians become universal metaphors for global rebirth. “We are in the era of something new,” says the Palestinian artist. “Of change, opportunity, creativity, imagination. So we must bid farewell to the age of war and hatred. In the post-coronavirus apocalypse, any leader in the world who does not endorse pure awareness to protect the planet first, followed by equal welfare for all its citizens, will eventually have no chance.” When the Covid-19 crisis hit, the artist was about to put up for auction his six metre-wide photographic triptych called “No Man’s Land” at Sotheby’s, donating all of the proceeds to Birzeit’s Palestinian Museum Education Programme.
Read the full interview published in Al Qattan Website (English)
Read the full interview published in Al Qattan Website (Arabic)
Mural of The Great Return
Steve Sabella – On a Journey to the Beginning and the End
Al-Araby Al-Jadeed
Interview by Mohammed al-Assad & front page feature
May 15, 2019
The Great March of Return, which resembles a mural painted on a “space without borders”, is by the Palestinian artist Steve Sabella. Some who saw it for the first time said that it is the Palestinian Sistine Chapel, resembling the heavenly ceiling by the Italian painter Michelangelo. He painted the many stories of the creation of the world, its death and revival—the beginning and the end of time—between the years 1508-1512. This work is considered the peak of the Renaissance period, the period of revival.
We interviewed the artist Steve Sabella and it seems that this idea was not far from his mind. He worked for a long time creating a composition including more than 1000 photographs. The idea behind the work is of a rising nation embarking on a great return journey towards its homeland, that is, towards life again. Amidst fire, smoke, killing and destruction, a rising nation tells its stories…
In this conversation, we discover the context of the work, its source of inspiration, the concerns of the artist and his unique techniques, using the colours in photographic images like the painter uses his brushes and palette.
Identity Between Two Worlds: The Art of Materializing Exile
Alkhaleej (Arabic)
By Mohammed Al-Asaad
Oct 17, 2016
What is identity? Is it assigned through words? Are they the labels we are born into and continue on living under in their shadows? The current Palestinian answer was proposed by the experiences of Edward Said who said that identity has a fluid nature––it does not settle, or rather it should not settle. He described it as whatever the person wants it to be, subject to constant change.
But Steve adds new meaning in his book, derived from his life in exiled Jerusalem, and then in exile in London and Berlin, where he now lives. His multiplicitous identity arose from where he was born amongst standardized labels, from family, to community and the wider homeland. Steve says he stands with the people of Palestine, who are subjected to uprooting, from the land and the self. That is a given and non-negotiable. But what matters most to him is justice. It is through this mindset that the artist transcends identity, instead stitching his own with the threads of what he sees, knows and learns.
PDF (Arabic)
Sometimes the Answer is Right There in Front of You – The Parachute Paradox
Al-Araby Al-Jadeed (Arabic)
Prologue featured, translated by Mohammed Al-Asaad
September 28, 2016
The Parachute Paradox includes narrative segments from the personal life of Steve Sabella as a conceptual artist born in occupied Jerusalem in 1975. It includes his experience in confronting the colonization of the imagination, which he considers more brutal than the occupation of the land. Sabella’s relationship with Jerusalem is a major topic in his art across different periods of his output and in different mediums, which led ultimately to writing, after he positioned his name amongst the most prominent of his generation on the world art map.
Steve Sabella Occupation and Exile… and Transformations
Al-Araby Al-Jadeed
By Antawan Joukai
March 15, 2014
PDF (Arabic)
Steve Sabella from Jerusalem to Exile
Al-Ayyam
By Najwan Darwish
Issue 4179 Volume 12
September 4, 2007
PDF (Arabic)
Steve Sabella: Volatile Identity. Postal Stamps from the Times of Globalization and Electronic Mail
Al-Akhbar
By Najwan Darwish
July 8, 2007
PDF (Arabic)
We have the Power to Change Every Structure we’ve Created on this Planet
Spitz Magazine (Hebrew) and ID Festival Online Magazine (English/German)
Interview by Tal Alon
Oct 2016
Sabella is arguably the perfect protagonist: his art and writing are at once very personal as well as political and universal; his monologues are passionate, while leaving room for question marks.
PDF (Hebrew)
PDF (German)
view on the Spitz magazine website (Hebrew)
Independence – The Light Dancers of Steve Sabella
Tanz
By Arnd Wesemann
January 2015
PDF
view on Tanz website
In Exile / Jerusalem – An Interview with Steve Sabella
Israel & Palästina – Palästinensische Kunst
Deutsch-Israelischen Arbeitskreis für Frieden im Nahen Osten e.V.
By Rainer Zimmer-Winkel
2014
PDF (German)
visit the diAk website
Portfolio: Steve Sabella
Brennpunkt – Berlin
By Dorothea Schoene
January 2012
PDF (German)
Grenzgänge – Beispiele künstlerischen Arbeitens über Exil und Entwurzelung
Springerin
By Charlotte Bank Springerin
2011
PDF (German)
Face to Face
Zenith Magazine
By Doerthe Engelcke
2009
In terms of numbers 6:1, what do they signify?
The work is highly coded. One of the obvious symbols is the number 6 which might remind people of the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust.
More complicated though is the question of survival that haunts Israelis and Palestinians. The installation, as a reminder entails the printing of life size images of six Israelis on one side and the
image of the Palestinian directly opposite and facing them. One of the participating Israelis indicated that people might perceive the work as a shooting range. The installation will create a visual unresolved tension (especially because of the uneven number) that questions survival aspects between Palestinians and Israelis.
The numbers might also trigger the concept of the collective that shapes the region, where nations are treated collectively rather than taking into account the individuality of people.
PDF (English)
PDF (German)
Da Bosch alla Bibbia. Steve Sabella a Torino
Artribune
By Federica Maria Giallombardo (Italian)
May 2018
Between the dark room and the innovative triumph of digital, the great pictorial tradition also finds its breath: ” If you look at the details of my works “, says the artist, ” you can see fragments of figurative compositions and literary traditions, like a certain creatural naturalism taken from Bosch and the Bible (in particular from Genesis). Some subjects remember Adam and Eve; others are waiting and hope for a sort of revenge or reflect on an enigma “. (translation)
PDF (Italian)
Read on Artribune
Steve Sabella. Archaeology of the future
Doppiozero
By Silvia Mazzucchelli
December 24, 2014
It is not possible to identify which is the archetypal fragment that composes his collages, there is no “pure fruit” as James Clifford would say. However these metamorphoses contain a perfectly recognizable visual alphabet (a window, a tree, a terrace) that are at the same time indices of a completely new space and code: the composition-syntax of the images are fragmented by the movement impressed by the author , which is accompanied by a look not only “other than itself”, but also “excessive”, understood as an infinite number of points of view and alternative worlds, which correspond to the juxtaposition of fragments placed in the image. (translation)
PDF (Italian)
Steve Sabella and Archaeology of the Future – A Show in Verona
Artribune
By Terry Peterle
November 7, 2014
PDF (Italian)
Steve Sabella, Memories as Artifacts
Arte
By Luca Maffeo
October 2014
PDF (Italian)
Verona – Steve Sabella
Exibart
By Camilla Bertoni
September 2014
PDF (Italian)
view on Exhibart website
Euphoria
Juliet
By Sara Rossino
November 2011
It is in this state of transition and investigation that the external reality penetrates violently and brings the artist back to his earthly roots. Sabella’s introspective process melts and fuses with the recent events in the Arab world …. Agony and pain seem to be the price for Arabs to pay in order to enable them to start a process of liberation, awakening and rebirth. As an observer, there seems to be common traits between the artist’s condition and the Arab Revolution… The possibilities offered by the current historical events, and the reflection about himself and his constant transformation give birth to Sabella’s last series Beyond Euphoria.
PDF (Italian)
Steve Sabella – In Exile – Conversation with the Artist
Exhibition Catalogue, Metroquadro Gallery, Turin
By Sara Rossino
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.
We have the Power to Change Every Structure we’ve Created on this Planet
Spitz Magazine (Hebrew) and ID Festival Online Magazine (English/German)
Interview by Tal Alon
Oct 2016
Sabella is arguably the perfect protagonist: his art and writing are at once very personal as well as political and universal; his monologues are passionate, while leaving room for question marks.
PDF (Hebrew)
PDF (German)
view on the Spitz magazine website (Hebrew)
The Arab World Photographed by a Pioneering Biennale
RFI
By Siegfried Forster
November 11, 2015
Territory in Exile – Exile of Identity
By Stéphanie Ravel
L’Agenda Magazine
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.
PDF (English & French)
Palestinian Tragedy through the Eyes of the Artist
Cumhuriyet
Interview by Evrim Altug
July 27 & 28, 2014
In my work I engage in an archeology of the future, which is not necessarily based on finding physical objects, but is rather based on understanding images and their formation. This has been the human quest since the beginning of time. And yet what characterizes the world today is a lack of consciousness. We lost the ability to connect ourselves to our surroundings because we consume the world mostly from a safe distance, through its image. This has led us to incessantly question what is real and what is not. One thing is for sure, human suffering is real, unlike the illusions I create. My illusions are only meant to act as imagined bridges, map-like structures that connect us to our past with an eye to the future.
PDF (Turkish)
PDF (English)