Steve Sabella (Arabic: 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.
As a winner of the 2008 Ellen Auerbach prize, his first artist monograph Steve Sabella - Photography 1997-2014 was published by Hatje Cantz at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin in 2014.
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.
[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.
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.
"[15] 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.
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.
[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.
[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 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.
[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.