38 Days of Re-Collection
2014
B&W white film negatives (generated from digital images) printed with b&w photo emulsion spread on color paint fragments collected from Jerusalem’s Old City house walls. The photographs were taken in an Occupied Palestinian house since 1948.
FRAGMENTS
Solo Exhibition | Berloni Gallery | London
From the Prolegomenon of Steve Sabella: Photography 1997 – 2014 | Kerber Verlag
Hubertus von Amelunxen
In 2009 Sabella rented a house in Ein Karim in Jerusalem, which a Palestinian family had abandoned, to secure themselves, when they heard about the Deir Yassin massacre in April 1948. He stayed in it for thirty-eight days, taking photographs of objects—utensils, walls, pictures—visually frisking the history of the place. Then, in his parental home and in other houses in the Old City of Jerusalem, he removed pieces of walls, little bits of painted plaster, or just of stained chalk. The color photographs were copied onto black-and white film, and the pieces of fresco, flayed bits of wall, were covered in an emulsion, and the negatives from the house he lived in projected and fixed on that emulsion. Because of the different colors of the carrier, the black-and-white images take on a mysterious, dreamlike presence that really belongs to no place and no time. They look ghostly; are the absence of presence and the presence of absence, and it is hard to decide which place or time they belong to.
Fragments from our Beautiful Future | Kerber Verlag
Almút Sh. Bruckstein
Steve Sabella’s 38 Days of Re-Collection is comprised of black-and-white photographs imprinted upon colored shards of paint. Peeled from the walls of houses in the Old City of Jerusalem, including the house in which Sabella was born, the fragments present a unique archive of personal memory and displacement.
What appears to be findings from an archaeological dig are in essence pieces of filmic illusion: we see interiors, kitchen utensils, domestic galleries of family portraits, toys and other personal items from an Israeli household residing in an early-20th-century Arab house. The original owners escaped in 1948 with their belongings seized and their estate occupied by the State. Sabella‘s photographic fragments, shards of a mural, contain detailed patterns, shadows of floor tiles typical for the elaborate architecture of the “Arab house”—in doing so, the series claims the artist‘s own “law of return.”
The Collection
House of Taswir | Kerber Verlag
FRAGMENTS FROM OUR BEAUTIFUL FUTURE | Bumiller Collection Museum | Berlin
„All existence is an imagination within an imagination... being a dream within a dream“ (Ibn Arabi)
Fragments From Our Beautiful Future. Contemporary Interventions in The Bumiller Collection #3presents the work of Jerusalem-born artist Steve Sabella (*1975) and Berlin artist Rebecca Raue (*1976) in a constellation with ancient chess pieces and Persian mirrors from the Bumiller Collection. With essays and poetic contributions by contemporary thinkers, art historians and curators, the publication creates a radical space of reflections on atomic time, cut-up and remix.
Short Film
In the Darkroom with Steve Sabella
"When you are in the darkroom, you don’t speak with anyone. The only thing you speak with is … art.”
click here to see the making of 38 Days of Re-Collection.
click here to see the base the image are printed on.
Video
Fragments from our Beautiful Future at The Bumiller Collection | Berlin
Glass & Light Installation
All That Remains
Wood shard collected from Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on top of fragments with photographs taken in a Palestinian house occupied by Israel in 1948.