About
Growing up in Jerusalem, I learned early that images are not neutral. They circulate, persuade, simplify, legitimise, and silence. That discovery marked the beginning of a sustained inquiry into how images participate in systems of control — and how they might be reworked to liberate perception from its own captivity.
My practice unfolds through long-term artistic projects that sometimes return to existing images — not to document reality, but to interrogate how reality is visually constructed, inherited, and internalized. I approach the image not as a neutral record of what happened, but as an active force that continues to act upon the world — and upon us.
Since the early 2000s, my work has incorporated narrative, archival fragments, and symbolic reconstruction. I work across photography, collage, installation, and text, using visual dissonance not as an effect, but as a method. Across different bodies of work, I return to a recurring question: how images shape who we believe we are — and how they might be reimagined otherwise.
Alongside exhibitions, my practice moves between making, writing, and transmission. I am the author of The Parachute Paradox (Kerber Verlag, 2016), a memoir tracing a lived journey toward the decolonization of imagination, and The Artist's Curse | On Being an Artist: Navigating the Art Market and the Art World, a practice-based work that examines artistic autonomy, structural pressures, and survival from within the lived reality of the art world.
Since relocating to Berlin in 2010, my practice has continued to deepen its engagement with the city's cultural and intellectual life. Since 2024, I have been leading The Art Practice | From Vision to Action at the Barenboim–Said Akademie in Berlin — extending my artistic inquiry into a shared space where imagination, responsibility, and form are continually tested and renegotiated.
I do not see my role as representing reality, but as intervening in how it is seen. My work seeks to open images rather than close them — to create spaces where perception can loosen, shift, and begin again.
Author, curator, member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin | Former President of the European Graduate School in Saas Fee, Switzerland.
Hubertus Von Amelunxen
"His art is an art of understanding; it is poetic and suppresses neither expulsion nor salvation. It keeps to the path and forms a bridge—it is the bridge."
Art historian & critic
Martina Corgnati
“From 1997 on, the images, series, and projects of Steve Sabella explore the invisible dimension of the human condition—the uncanny and the search for meaning.
Exile begins as a physical and contingent condition and becomes mental: a category of the soul that calls for answers, answers that evolve over a lifetime.
Sabella raises the horizon from the contingent to the universal, escaping rhetoric without losing his identity as an artist—on the contrary, conquering it."
Prepared by Steve Sabella Studio
Photography as Excavation: Steve Sabella and the Liberated Image
This essay brings together published criticism, artist writings, and project texts to trace the larger movement of Steve Sabella’s work. Rather than offering a chronological biography, it follows a recurring question across the practice: how the image moves beyond documentation to become a site of excavation, memory, and liberation.
