The final room was dedicated to Sabella’s daughter Cecile, a recurrent figure in his work. In this small room, the viewer was surrounded by photographs of the bright colours of her clothes. The image suggest that this little girl has now entered Sabella’s fragmented world as he almost obsessively documents the patterns, stitching, lint and stains of her garments. In a handmade book made up of the same colourful images, Sabella left a half-erased handwritten note for all to see: ‘I gave birth to something alien to me. When Cecile was born forty-three months ago, it was only a question of time until we had difficulties communicating.’ Cecile spoke her mother’s Swiss-German while he spoke Arabic. ‘She is simply foreign to me,’ he writes. But upon moving from Jerusalem to London, Sabella recounts how he and his daughter found a language between them in a common experience of exile.

Both Six Israelis and One Palestinian and Cecile Elise Sabella mandate the acknowledgment of the individual as an autonomous being worthy of recognition. The latter, a tender and apologetic declaration of love from the artist to his young daughter, portrays pairs of square-cuts from the child’s colourful clothes and is included in the exhibition. Conceived as an artist’s book, these images too deal with duality, but they also mirror the essential connection between a father and a daughter, two exiles born in Jerusalem, two of the same cloth.