The artist Steve Sabella was born in 1975 in the Old City of Jerusalem, and grew up in a house with many pets, many plants, and a lemon tree and grapevine in the courtyard. While studying at the Musrara School of Photography in Jerusalem, Steve married his wife Francesca. To this day, Steve sees her as an extension of his eyes. Their daughter Cécile was born in 2004, and has continued to find her way into Steve’s frames, for example, in the 2013 series Independence.
From 1997 to 2007, Steve was the most exhibited artist in Palestine, having staged eleven solo exhibitions. Steve and his family moved to London in 2007, where he pursued two master’s degrees: one was in photographic studies as a Chevening scholar at the Uni-versity of Westminster, which he finished with the Caparo Award of Distinction. The other, partially funded by the Said Foundation, was in art business from Sotheby’s Institute of Art. He soon started to publish essays on the global art market, and especially on its relation to the art world of the Middle East.
Steve was awarded the Ellen Auerbach Award from Berlin’s prestigious Akademie der Künste in 2008, which, six years later, led to the publication of his monograph Steve Sabella – Photography 1997–2014, mapping his whole life of art-making. Since moving to Berlin in 2010, his studio has continued to grow and flourish, with Steve’s work selling at major auction houses and being collected by institutions such as the British Museum and MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha. In 2014, he staged four international solo exhibitions, one of which produced the book Archaeology of the Future. His life has also become the subject of a series of documentaries, including In the Darkroom with Steve Sabella, which has been screened at numerous film festivals and venues from Dubai to Boston.
From a young age, Steve developed a strong relation to language, and in 2016, his memoir The Parachute Paradox was released by the esteemed German publisher Kerber Verlag. The book follows Steve’s upbringing in occupied Palestine, his search for liberation from within, and his developing means of resistance to the colonized imagination. Beyond a narrative of exile, Steve writes about the human connection transcending culture and nationality, and advocates for global citizenship. As Mahmoud Darwish wrote, “All the hearts of the people are my identity – so take away my passport!”
