Steve Sabella
Steve Sabella is a Berlin-based artist who works primarily with photography, collage, and installation. He is the author of the memoir The Parachute Paradox: Decolonizing the Imagination first published by Kerber Verlag in 2016.
His work has been discussed in relation to the genealogy and archaeology of the image, and to themes of identity and exile, including the “colonization of the imagination”.
Sabella was among the artists commissioned for Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art inaugural exhibition Told/Untold/Retold. Sabella has shown his work internationally at institutions and exhibitions including, the British Museum, the 1st Biennial of Arab Photography, Les Rencontres d'Arles, Foto Fest Houston, Arab World Institute, and the International Center for Photography Scavi Scaligeri, which presented a retrospective of his work in 2014. In 2008, he received the Ellen-Auerbach-Fellowship for Photography from the Akademie der Künste ; recipients are selected by nomination and jury. In 2014, Hatje Cantz and the Akademie der Künste published his monograph Steve Sabella – Photography 1997–2014, which includes texts by Hubertus von Amelunxen and Kamal Boullata.
Early career and education
Sabella studied art photography at the Musrara School of Photography in Jerusalem, graduating in 1997. He later completed a BA in Visual Studies at the State University of New YorWhile based in Jerusalem, he worked as an artist and as a commissioned photographer for international organisations, including UNICEF, UNRWA and the United Nations Development Programme. In July 2005, UNDP officials identified Sabella and an Australian colleague as two contractors abducted in Gaza; both were released unharmed after about three hours.
Sabella moved to London in 2007 and later relocated to Berlin, where he is based.
Visual art
Sabella works with large-scale photography, photographic collage, and mixed media. Across these formats, he has described his visual works as a form of research into the genealogy of the image. In his writing and interviews, he has contrasted his approach with documentary notions of photographic indexicality, arguing that photographic images can construct their own realities. He has also linked the production of such “alternative realities” to political questions, suggesting that images can shape the collective imagination, including in relation to Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Writers on Sabella’s work have described it through the language of visual archaeology and palimpsest, linking his use of fragments and layered images to memory, displacement, and the formation of identity.Recurring themes in Sabella's work
Critical writing on Sabella’s practice has discussed the relationship between image and memory, and has often addressed themes of displacement, exile, and the politics of representation. Commentators have described works such as 38 Days of Re-Collection as layered constructions in which walls, fragments, and photographic imagery function as material traces of lived history.Visual archaeology
Throughout his practice, Sabella has produced works that examine how visual history is constructed and how images participate in that process. Writers have frequently discussed his method through the language of archaeology, treating images as sites to be excavated rather than transparent records. In some works, Sabella builds images through processes of layering and revision; in others, photographs are presented as objects—for example, by printing black-and-white photo emulsion on Jerusalem stone or by transferring images onto fragments of scraped wall paint. In the series 38 Days of Re-Collection, photographs are printed onto paint fragments scraped from walls in Jerusalem’s Old City; Ella Shohat describes the scraping as “an act of excavation of the buried substrata of forgotten lives,” and as a way to “visualise lives once again intermingled." Independent curator Nat Muller described 38 Days of Re-Collection as making Sabella "a time capsule mediating the temporal limbo of the Palestinian condition."Exile, the Palestinian experience and the colonisation of the imagination
Critics of Sabella's work have often noted and discussed the themes of exile and the Palestinian experience. Artworks like Settlement - Six Israelis & One Palestinian and 38 Days of Re-Collection engage more directly with 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.Arts writer Myrna Ayad wrote that “it is his name which instantly displaces him,” and added that “whereas Sabella’s name may mislead, the titles of his artworks do not.”
In a 2014 statement, Sabella argued that imagination is central to self-determination, describing a “colonisation of the imagination” as a condition that must be resisted at the level of the individual.
In the artist’s monograph, Hubertus von Amelunxen wrote that Sabella “chose exile,” and that his work confronts exile “in its distorting and destructive consequences,” describing Sabella’s art as “an art of understanding… forms a bridge — it is the bridge.”
Experimentation of the photographic medium
Since the beginning of his career, Sabella has experimented with the photographic medium across different formats and materials. His early series Search was shot on infrared film, while later works such as Kan Yama Kan and Settlement – Six Israelis & One Palestinian reconfigure photographs within installation-based presentation. He has also produced works in which photographs are printed on nontraditional supports, including stone from Jerusalem and fragments of peeling wall paint. In the foreword to Steve Sabella: Photography 1997–2014, Kamal Boullata wrote that Sabella has been “using his camera as a painter uses his brush,” and concluded that the images are “a dream to discover.”Musicality
In Steve Sabella – Photography 1997–2014, art historian Hubertus von Amelunxen relates musical concepts to Sabella’s photo-collage practice, drawing in particular on the notion of counterpoint. Writing on Sinopia—a collage of photographs of the skyline of Manama, Bahrain—von Amelunxen describes the city’s mirrored axis and the skyline’s “reverberat at different pitches,” suggesting that visual repetition can produce a “sound pattern.”Sabella has also collaborated with musicians: in 2014, he commissioned the jazz ensemble The Khoury Project to interpret the visual form of Sinopia as a waveform and to create an electroacoustic composition that sampled audio recorded in Bahrain.