2014

The Scavi Scaligeri International Centre for Photography is hosting Steve Sabella: Archaeology of the Future, the first solo exhibition by this artist of Palestinian origin in an Italian museum. Sabella’s artistic research takes up the real challenge facing photography today, which is the principle that links the image to the imagination. the exhibition, supported by Boxart (Verona) and in collaboration with Berloni (london), has also been made possible by the critical assistance of the Islamic Art historian Karin Adrian von Roques, who has enriched the catalogue with a generously in-depth essay.
As one of the events of Art Verona, the exhibition is being held in the Photo Art Verona section, with the official opening, on Saturday, 11 October, coinciding with the weekend of the fair and with the tenth giornata del contem-poraneo, organised by AMACI (the Association of Italian contemporary Art Museums).

So why “archaeology of the future”? The title of the exhibition is clearly a paradox, but more than anything it is a manifesto of intent. It is only by digging into what Bergson called the «stream of life», which is to say into the meagre past of a human existence, that it is possible to get closer to the bases for a single tomorrow, which in many respects is shared.

And if the pleasure of this excavation - of this recherche, as Proust pointed out - is not in searching for new landscapes but in travelling with new eyes, then Steve Sabella is an authentic traveller. through his eyes we can glimpse his exile from Jerusalem - where he was born in 1975 - to Europe, but, like the four thdimen- sion of cubism, his view also opens up an inner vision of space and of a sequence of events. It could indeed be said that many of the works on display in Verona are in a sense derived from Jerusalem, in some cases mimicking age- old archaeological fragments.there are stones from the old city and plaster detached from the houses occupied during the war of 1947- 48 - from which some 700,000 Palestinians were forced to flee. A bitter conflict that has still not been resolved. every trace left by the artist is thus a fragment of history stuck in the present, an instant which sums up the premises for the future.