Steve Sabella

Steve Sabella ( ar, ستيف سابيلا) (born 19 May 1975 in Jerusalem) is a Berlin-based artist who uses photography and photographic installation as his principle modes of expression, and author of the memoir '' The Parachute Paradox'', published by Kerber Verlag in 2016.

Sabella has shown his work internationally, at institutions and exhibitions such as Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Rencontres d'Arles, Houston FotoFest, Arab World Institute, The Bumiller Collection Berlin, and the International Center for Photography Scavi Scaligeri, which hosted his first institutional retrospective in 2014. As a winner of the 2008 Ellen Auerbach prize, his first artist monograph ''Steve Sabella - Photography 1997-2014'' was published by Hatje Cantz, Berlin in 2014.

Early career and education

Sabella first began studying at the Naggar School of Photography in Jerusalem, receiving a degree in Art Photography in 1997. In 2007, he received a BA in Visual Arts from the State University of New York.

While living in Jerusalem, Sabella worked as both an artist and commissioned photographer. Hired by the United Nations Development Programme, UNICEF, UNRWA and many other aid organizations, he was one of the few photographers with complete access to the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem during the Second Intifada, which had drastically limited the mobility of Palestinians. In 2005, he was listed as one of Pillars Magazine's most established brands in Palestine. The same year, Sabella and one of his colleagues were taken hostage in Gaza, abducted by the family of a Palestinian security officer kidnapped by the Palestinian National Authority. He was released unharmed, after several hours of holding.

In 2007, Sabella established the Palestine Photo Bank, an online image archive formed with the mission of promoting and supporting a positive picture of Palestine and its people.

Sabella moved from Palestine to London in 2007, and began to focus solely on his art career. He completed an MA in Photographic Studies from the University of Westminster in 2008, and an MA in Art Business from Sotheby's Institute of Art in 2009. In 2010, he moved to Berlin, where he is currently based.

Visual Art

Sabella has utilized large-scale photography, photographic collage, and mixed media in his visual practice. Irrespective of the method or medium, he considers his visual works as a form of research into the genealogy of the image. Rather than something that bears an indexical reference to the world, Sabella sees the photographic image as containing and producing its own form of reality. He has suggested that the creation of these alternate realities can be utilized politically, both as a means to foreclose or liberate the collective imagination—specifically in regards to
Israel's occupation of Palestine.

Recurring themes in Sabella's work

Archaeology

Throughout his artistic practice, Sabella has created works concerned with the construction of visual history, investigating the role of the image in this process. He has often drawn parallels between his artwork and the field of archaeology, 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."

Exile, the Palestinian experience & the colonization 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'' 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."

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.”

Experimentation of the photographic medium

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 abellahas 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."

Musicality

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…"

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.

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

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.

Group exhibitions

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).

Selected art publications

''Steve Sabella - Photography 1997-2014''

The first monograph of the artist's work, ''Steve Sabella - Photography 1997-2014'', was published by Hatje Cantz

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