S t e v e S A B E L L A
Having realized that Sabella lives in what he refers to as "mental exile", he is now trying to give a visual form to the 'state of mind' of living in this exile. Sabella is deconstructing his surroundings and rebuilding them by assembling hundreds of images together until a 'new form' or 'impossible reality' is created. This project was directly related to Sabella's conception that his city of birth Jerusalem does not exist (jerusalem in exile 2006) and hence this explained his state of alienation. Furthermore, traces of this project can be seen in other projects such as Cecile Elise Sabella (2008) where he experiences the duality of exile, Mentalopia (2007) where people reside in foreign spaces, Exit (2006), where Sabella experiences what he terms 'exilic landscapes' and in much earlier works which he created in the last decade such as End of Days (2003), where Sabella penetrates his psyche. |
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in exile 2008 136/125 cm limited edition of 6 + 2 AP lambda prints mounted on aluminium with a 5 cm aluminum edge WATCH a 4 minute TV documentary (visual journey) on this work produced by IKONO-TV - click here
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"I like Steve's use of the photographic surface to produce a kind of visual vertigo. His images flatten and extend the plane of the photographic medium transforming their representational quality to endless data." |
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Clare Grafik, curator of the Photographers Gallery London |
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Steve Sabella, originally from the Old City of Jerusalem and now living in London, uses a complex technique of photomontage to investigate his own condition of “mental exile”. His project “In Exile” (2008) draws the viewer into images of multiple perspectives that turn even the simplest view into disturbing and disorienting landscapes. He seeks to deconstruct the familiar in order to recompose it and thus create a new reality through compositions that correspond to the experience of living in constant exile.
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Charlotte Bank, curator
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“There are still people who perceive Palestinian art in a militant and national way.” 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. On the occasion of the exhibition Palestine, Creativity In All Its States, showing until Feb 10th at the Bahrain National Museum, Steve Sabella offers l’Agenda’s readers the key to viewing contemporary Palestinian art through a different lens. |
Stephanie Ravel , writer for L'Agenda Magazine (English translation by May Asfour) FULL ARTICLE PDF |
One of the works that moved me was by Steve Sabella, titled In Exile (2008), in which he had taken a seemingly dull picture of the windows facing his own apartment building in an ordinary London neighborhood and juxtaposed endless inverted reproductions of it, creating a visual illusion of movement and infinity through the classical techniques of geometrical repetition, symmetry and complementarity that are associated with the arabesque form. Exile can be quite uneventful, monotonous and redundant, a sort of continuous movement without every getting anywhere. There is nothing heroic about being just another tenant in a shapeless apartment building, no matter how tragic the events that led to you living there are. The sense of solitude, alienation and powerlessness the work expressed left me with a knot in my stomach, especially when I look outside my own window and see the long lines of eerily similar houses, clones really, that make an ordinary Canadian suburban neighborhood.
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Yara El-Ghadban - exhibition visitor at the Institut du Monde Arabe |
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| RELATED REVIEWS |
New Vision: Arab Contemporary Art in the 21st Century (Thames & Hudson) 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.’ DOWNLOAD Christie's Book Launch in Oct. 2009. PDF |
Art Magazine Cover Artwork on the Front & Back cover of the 6th edition of Contemporary Practices Art Journal. The same artwork went for a Christie's auction April 27, 2010 for the International Modern and Contemporary Art (Dubai). |
Steve Sabella - The Journey of Artistic Interrogation and Introspection
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Steve Sabella
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Territory in Exile - Exile of Identity 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. DOWNLOAD REVIEW PDF |
Steve Sabella: In Exile Physical exile in London followed mental exile in 2007. There, his artistic grappling with the omnipresent feelings of alienation took on a new, more complex shape. The windows shown from multiple perspectives in the works of In Exile are views from the place where the artist lives. The symbolism here is intentionally many-layered. The windows provide prospects and hope, seeming to permit the widest variety of angles of view, but still remain closed and keep the viewer outside, like an uninvolved observer. Life plays out in front of the window, but access to it is blocked. Here the artist seems a captive of the eternal search for himself in the mosaic of his mental landscape. He draws the viewer into disturbing views and robs him of balance and security. He deconstructs the familiar in order to assemble it anew, thereby creating a new constellation of reality that establishes parallels to the experiences of a never-ending exile. |
Steve Sabella in Exile - Conversation with the Artist 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.
DOWNLOAD CATALOGUE - PDF |
Reflections on Palestine - THE EMPTY QUARTER DUBAI 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. DOWNLOAD REVIEW PDF |
Steve Sabella - I am From Jerusalem
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Reconstructing Deconstruction
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