Steve Sabella
Palestinian artist
Steve Sabella (Arabic: ستيف سابيلا) (born 19 May 1975 in Jerusalem) is a Palestinian visual artist, author, and educator based in Berlin. He 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, and The Artist's Curse (Emaginity, 2023).
Rather than using photography only to document reality, Sabella treats the image as a site of excavation, where memory, place and history are constructed. A related concern in his writing is the liberated image, photography released from conventional function and used to construct new visual realities. His work has been discussed in relation to the genealogy and archaeology of the image, and to themes of identity and exile, including what Sabella has called the "colonization of the imagination."
Sabella was among the artists commissioned for Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art's inaugural exhibition Told/Untold/Retold (2010–11). He has shown his work internationally at institutions and exhibitions including the British Museum, the 1st Biennial of Arab Photography (Maison Européenne de la Photographie and the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris), Les Rencontres d'Arles, FotoFest Houston, and the International Center for Photography Scavi Scaligeri (Verona), which presented a retrospective of his work in 2014.
In 2008, he received the Ellen-Auerbach-Fellowship for Photography from the Akademie der Künste (Berlin); recipients are selected by nomination and jury. In 2014, Hatje Cantz and the Akademie der Künste (Berlin) 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.
The public source identifies “Steve Sabella” as palestinian artist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Steve, Sabella and Palestinian.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7613829. VIAF identifies the subject as 310661498. The Library of Congress control number is no2015045871. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1975, 2016, 2023 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Steve Sabella” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.