Steve Sabella

Till the End (2004)

Throughout his artistic practice, Sabella has created works concerned with the construction of visual history, investigating the role of the image in this process.[9] He has often drawn parallels between his artwork and the field of archaeology,[10] both in practice and theory: some of his photo-collages are partly composed by continuously removing layers of photographic visuals; other artworks have been printed on stones and paint fragments, appearing as ancient artifacts. Regarding the 38 Days of Re-Collection series, consisting of photographs printed on fragments of paint scraped from the walls of Jerusalem's Old City, the scholar Ella Shohat wrote, "Scraping thus becomes both an act of excavation of the buried substrata of forgotten lives, as well as a means to visualise lives once again intermingled."[11]

38 Days of Re-Collection (2014) (installation view), at International Centre for Photography Scavi Scaligeri, Verona, Italy

Critics of Sabella's work have often noted and discussed the themes of exile and the Palestinian experience.[12] Artworks like Settlement - Six Israelis & One Palestinian and 38 Days of Re-Collection bear more explicit connotations of Sabella's birthplace in their content and media, but the themes of diaspora and occupation are also suggested by the titles of his series such as In Exile and Independence.

In 2014 Sabella stated, "All we need is the imagination to find who we are and what we are searching for. It is the responsibility of the individual to stand up and free him or herself from the new form of colonization that people are affected by yet are unaware of, the colonization of the imagination. Palestinians do not need the UN, the EU, the United States or any other country in the world, and especially not Israel, to declare to them that they are free. We are all born free. Every Palestinian should wake up today and say –– I am a free person."[13]

38 Days of Re-Collection (2014)

In the artist's monograph, Hubertus von Amelunxen wrote, ”Steve Sabella is a Palestinian, born in Jerusalem in 1975 … Although he still has the privilege of being able to return, he chose exile, and art teaches him to grasp exile in its distorting and destructive consequences, which leads to an existence that is marked by a driven search and borders on disintegration. His art is an art of understanding; it is poetic and suppresses neither expulsion nor salvation. It keeps to the path and forms a bridge — it is the bridge.”[14]

Settlement - Six Israelis & One Palestinian (2010) (installation view), at MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar

Since the beginning of his artistic career, Sabella has experimented and played upon the traditions of the photographic medium: his 1997 series Search was shot on infrared film; Kan Yama Kan (2005) and Settlement - Six Israelis & One Palestinian (2008-2010) both reconfigure photographs to be viewed through installation; photographs in his works Till the End (1997) and 38 Days of Re-Collection (2014) are printed on stones and fragments of paint, respectively. Sabella's photo-collages such as Euphoria (2010) and Metamorphosis (2012) have elicited comparisons to the medium of painting; in this respect, the artist and historian Kamal Boullata has written, "Over the last decade [Sabella] has been using his camera as a painter uses his brush... A few decades ago, that is, long before globalization permeated all fields of cultural expression in our world, I wrote on the evolution of Palestinian painting following the country's national catastrophe in 1948. I documented how painters living at home or as refugees in the proximity of the homeland have universally employed a representational language of expression. The further away they lived, the more they engaged in abstraction. At the time, I never imagined such a phenomenon could possibly manifest itself in the field of photography."[15]

Sinopia (detail) (2014) by Steve Sabella

The variation in formal rhythm and tone in many of Sabella's photo-collages, as well as the theme running throughout his work of divergent voices being placed in dialogue, has prompted Hubertus von Amelunxen to relate musical concepts to his oeuvre. In Steve Sabella - Photography 1997-2014, von Amelunxen draws connections to notions of counterpoint, and writes specifically on Sabella's work Sinopia, which collages photographs of the skyline of Manama, Bahrain, "The city, photographed at dawn and during the day, is reflected along the central axis, the sea and sky indistinguishable from one another and the skyline, appearing out of the mist of dawn, retracting and then rising up again, reverberates at different pitches. Through visual reiteration, shadowy high-rises, a sound pattern emerges…" [16]

Sabella has also collaborated with musicians. In 2014, he commissioned the jazz ensemble The Khoury Project to interpret the visual form of his Sinopia skyline collage as a waveform, and create an electroacoustic composition that also sampled audio from locations in Bahrain.[17]

From 1997 to the late 2000s, Sabella exhibited his work at various venues in Palestine. 2010 saw Sabella's first solo in Europe, Steve Sabella: In Exile at Metroquadro Gallery, Rivoli. Since then, notable solo exhibitions include Archaeology of the Future at the International Centre for Photography Scavi Scaligeri, Verona (2014); Fragments at Berloni Gallery, London (2014); Layers at Contemporary Art Platform, Kuwait (2014); Independence at Meem Gallery, Dubai (2014); and Fragments From Our Beautiful Future at The Bumiller Collection Berlin.[18]

Sabella has shown work in group exhibitions including Gates of the Mediterranean at the Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli (2008, curated by Martina Corgnati); First Biennial of Photographers of the Contemporary Arab World at the Arab World Institute (IMA) and the Maison européenne de la photographie, Paris (2015, curated by Gabriel Bauret); Nel Mezzo del Mezzo at the Palazzo Riso, Palermo (2015, curated by Christine Macel); View From Inside at the FotoFest Biennial, Houston (2014, curated by Karin Adrian von Roques); and Keep Your Eye on the Wall at Les Rencontres d’Arles, Arles (2013, curated by MASASAM).[19]

The first monograph of the artist's work, Steve Sabella - Photography 1997-2014, was published by Hatje Cantz in collaboration with the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, in 2014. Its core texts are written by Hubertus von Amelunxen, with a foreword by Kamal Boullata. Hatje Cantz states that the book, "reads time and history out of the photographs and thus describes the genesis of Sabella’s photographic oeuvre under the aspects of exile, identity, migration, and the divided topologies of the 21st century."[20]

Published by Maretti Editore for Sabella's 2014 retrospective of the same name at the International Center for Photography Scavi Scaligeri, Archaeology of the Future contains texts by Sabella, Karin Adrian von Roque, Beatrice Benedetti, and Leda Monsour, among others.[21]

Steve Sabella and Rebecca Raue's exhibition of the same name, shown at The Bumiller Collection, Berlin, was accompanied by a catalogue published by Kerber Verlag. The book included texts discussing the works of Sabella, Raue, and medieval Persian game pieces and mirrors included in the show from The Bumiller's Collection's archive; contributors included Hubertus von Amelunxen, Ella Shohat, T.J. Demos, Elliot R. Wolfson, and A.S. Bruckstein Çoruh.

Sabella's memoir The Parachute Paradox was published in a limited edition of 1,250 by Kerber Verlag in 2016. The book details Sabella's upbringing in Jerusalem under Israeli occupation, his subsequent nomadism, and the development of his art practice as a means of mental emancipation from the colonization of the imagination.

On September 21, 2017, Sabella began publishing his new book project, The Artist's Curse. He has pledged to post online one new passage — or “curse” — every day for one year.[24] The curses are numbered, short-form and modular prose pieces ranging from abstract and inspirational notions about the life of an artist, to detailing real-world practices of the global art market.

For his visual art practice, Sabella has received a number of accolades, including Young Artist of the Year Award - A. M. Qattan Foundation in Palestine (2002),[25] the Chevening Scholarship for MA in Photographic Studies from University of Westminster (2008),[26] the Caparo Award of Distinction for MA in Photographic Studies from University of Westminster (2008), the Independent Photographers Terry O'Neil Award (2008, shortlisted and exhibited),[27] the Ellen Auerbach Award - Akademie der Künste in Berlin (2008),[28] and the Saïd Foundation Scholarship, which partially sponsored his studies for an MA in Art Business from Sotheby's Institute of Art (2009).[29]

Sabella has been the subject of a number of documentaries, including In The Darkroom with Steve Sabella by Nadia Johanne Kabalan (2014).[30] He has also participated in film interviews for Deutsche Welle,[31] France 24,[32] Al Jazeera[33] and Electronic Intifada.[34]