Steve Sabella
In Exile, 2008
In Exile Series
In Exile Series
In Exile Series
In Transition 1
In Transition 2
In Transition 3
Euphoria 1
Euphoria 2
Euphoria 3
Steve Sabella comes from Jerusalem’s Old City, where he was born in 1975. The continuous conflicts and the overlapping and contradictory narrative of his hometown and the appropriation of its symbolic value by the widest possible variety of groups, early gave the artist the feeling that he had no room for his own interpretations or his own self
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.
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. In this work, which alludes to the work of M.C. Escher as well as to the geometrical ornamentation of classical Islamic art, filigree trees fit into a whole – at first glance. A closer look reveals fractures and fissures. The individual parts of the picture move forward out of the montage, all at once seeming like a broken mirror. Perhaps this is an indication that the mental conflicts are not yet weathered, after all, and that euphoria cannot last. (Charlotte Bank)
Sabella’s Palestine Photo Bank
FANTASTIC FULL OF POWERFULL FEELINGS