From Exile to Everland: Steve Sabella’s Art of Decolonizing Imagination
From Exile to Everland: Steve Sabella’s Art of Decolonizing Imagination
Introduction
A man stands in exile, yet his art builds a home in the imagination. Steve Sabella, a Jerusalem-born artist based in Berlin, has spent a career turning displacement into a creative principle. His works are visual palimpsests of fragmentation and reassembly – haunting photo-collages that mirror the psychological landscape of exile and the yearning for liberation. Born in 1975 under Israeli occupation, Sabella “did not know life before the occupation” and grew up acutely aware of how images were used as colonial propaganda[1]. Photography itself, in his experience, carried a gaze that “overdetermined” his native city of Jerusalem in European and Israeli imagery[1]. Against this backdrop, Sabella set out to reclaim the image: to decolonize vision and imagination through art. The result is an oeuvre that spans intimate photo-montages of windowless confinement to grand, kaleidoscopic collages described as a “Palestinian Sistine Chapel”[2][3]. In what follows, we journey through Sabella’s major works – In Exile, 38 Days of Re-Collection, Elsewhere, Everland, New Image Order, Planet Earth, and more – not merely to describe them, but to interpret how they speak to perception, displacement, the colonial gaze, and the role of the artist today. Sabella’s art, critical yet hope-filled, invites us to imagine a “new visual terrain” beyond borders[4]. It is an art that sings of fragmentation and reconstruction, exile and everland, challenging us to see beyond imposed realities and to envision liberation with our own eyes.
The Fragmented Exile
Sabella’s early artistic experiments confront the feeling of exile in visceral visual form. His breakthrough series In Exile (2008) consists of five large photo-collages derived from snapshots of his London surroundings – the view out his window as a Palestinian newly abroad[5]. Rather than scenic cityscapes, Sabella sliced and multiplied these images into what one critic called “an overwhelming mosaic made of visual wild splinters. No horizon, no sky, just warped and disjointed walls”[5]. Indeed, In Exile offers “no pathways or exits or signs of guidance”; the photographs are a labyrinth of repeated windows and doors, evoking “alienation, fragmentation, suffocation, a scattered life”[6]. In these disorienting compositions, the artist gives shape to what Edward Said described as the “experience of the exiled” – a being “confined to an exile that transcends place”, as one contemporary reviewer observed[7]. Sabella’s exile is not merely physical displacement; it is a psychological state in which “Jerusalem…invaded his mind”, turning the concrete walls and barbed wires of home into internalized barriers[8]. By literally reconstructing fragments of London into a claustrophobic pattern, Sabella visualizes what it means to carry one’s homeland as an internal maze. We find ourselves peering at jumbled fenestrations and “blind windows” that yield no clear view[9] – an image of exile as living in perpetual limbo, “a condition that has been exiled from its self and must be lived through”[10].
And yet, even in this fragmentation there is a search for order. Critics noted that Sabella’s early collages, while devoid of focal point, still show “a clear attempt to structure and compose, as if to bring order into a photographic world” tied to his own biography[11]. This tension between chaos and composition gives In Exile a pulsing, almost musical quality – “a rhythmic movement…an arabesque sweep moving across the image…correspond[ing] to an almost musical writing”[12]. The effect is hermetic and haunting. Sabella “shifted from what Susan Sontag calls ‘a photographic way of seeing’ to one of cubistic imagining,” writes Kamal Boullata, describing how Sabella shot dozens of tiny vignettes – a window frame here, a glimpse of his child there – and tessellated them into a new whole recalling the interlocking patterns of an arabesque[13]. In this way, In Exile already hints at Sabella’s impulse not just to break images, but to rebuild them into a new vision. The series “represents the life of the artist in both the Jerusalem of geography and the Jerusalem of the psyche”[6]. It is, as Sabella later reflected, a visualization of what he had been through – a portrait of estrangement – but also the first step in an artistic journey toward transformation.
By 2012, Sabella’s project had evolved in the series Metamorphosis, which he described as representing “what he is in the process of becoming”[14][15]. In Metamorphosis, the fragmented cityscape of In Exile begins to reconfigure. The collages “openly face…barbed wires and the walls of separation and the demolition lands stored in memory,” yet now “new patterns are emerging”[15]. The once-impenetrable barriers in the imagery appear to shift and dissolve; where In Exile had no exit, Metamorphosis intimates that “perhaps wounds are being stitched, and healed”[15]. Sabella has suggested that this creative evolution was born of intense introspection. “I came to terms with my exile after a process of self interrogation and introspection,” he explains, invoking philosopher Vilém Flusser’s insight that exiles become free “not when they deny their lost homeland, but when they come to terms with it.” Sabella realized he could not change his origins – “I would always come from Jerusalem” – “but what could change is consciousness and perception”[16][17]. By examining exile from different angles, breaking and reassembling the image of his reality, “I freed myself,” Sabella says[16][18]. This hard-won artistic freedom – a kind of personal metamorphosis – sets the stage for Sabella’s later works, which venture beyond the self to tackle broader questions of history, memory, and ultimately the liberation of imagination itself.
Palimpsests of Memory
If Sabella’s early works are inward, grappling with the exile within, his mid-career projects turn outward to history – digging literally into walls and images to retrieve buried memories. A key turning point is the 2014 series 38 Days of Re-Collection, an astonishing marriage of photography and physical artifact. For this project Sabella “found unexpected ways of bringing tactility into his work”[19]. He returned to Jerusalem and peeled away actual fragments of paint and plaster from the walls of houses – including the house in Jerusalem’s Old City where he was born[20][21]. Many of these homes had complex histories: one was a Palestinian residence abandoned after 1948 and taken over by new inhabitants[22][21]. Sabella coated the collected paint chips in light-sensitive emulsion and printed black-and-white photographs onto them, using negatives of pictures he took during a 38-day stay in an emptied Palestinian house in Jerusalem[22][23]. The results are literally shards of the past: each irregular chip of wall bears a ghostly image – a domestic interior, a “domestic gallery” of family portraits and personal items from lives lived and lost[20][21]. Sabella has, in effect, created an archive of displacement out of the very material of displacement. “Peeled from the walls of houses in the Old City of Jerusalem… the fragments present a unique archive of personal memory and displacement,” writes critic Almút Bruckstein[20]. They look like relics from an archaeological dig, yet what they unearth is absence: “ghostly images” of kitchens and parlors, “shadows of floor tiles” from old Arab homes now inhabited by others[23][21]. The original Palestinian owners “escaped in 1948” and never returned[21]; in Sabella’s Re-Collection, their presence returns as phantom photographs on the very walls that entombed their memory.
Viewed together, the pieces of 38 Days of Re-Collection form a poignant palimpsest where past and present bleed into each other. Each painted fragment carries “strata of colors” from generations of repainting – literal layers of time – and upon these Sabella’s images float like specters[24]. The black-and-white scenes seem “flattened, obscured, fragmented, blurred and discolored,” just beyond the reach of clarity[25]. As art historian T. J. Demos observed, these photo-shards are “portals to the past, peeled-away strata, archaeological traces”[25]. Yet they also insist on being seen in the present, as physical objects in the viewer’s here-and-now. The paint chips are jagged, tactile proof of a reality that was – testaments to “the hands that painted them” decades ago[26]. By fusing indexical traces (the wall paint) with photographic illusion, Sabella achieves what one commentator called “the presence of absence”: a mysterious, dreamlike neither-here-nor-there[23]. The images belong to “no place and no time”[23] – or rather, they collapse place and time together. We see, for example, the “blurred outline of an old fashioned Palestinian nuclear family” hovering amid decorative motifs of a tiled floor[27]. Elsewhere a lone teakettle in a fragmentary kitchen appears, surrounded by peeling teal and ochre paint[27]. “All of the fragments attest to the lives lived, lost and forgotten within those spaces,” writes Malu Halasa; it is “highly charged emotional work” whose essence is “time travel: exile and return, reconstruction of homeland and the past, but above all, the impermanence of the human condition.”[27].
Sabella’s method in 38 Days is deeply paradoxical and profoundly political. In order to preserve the memory of these Palestinian homes, he had to destroy a part of them – peeling plaster from walls, “cutting short their timeline” as functioning structures[28][29]. It is, as critic Nat Muller put it, a “reversed archaeology”: instead of excavating buried relics, Sabella makes relics by arresting the decay midstream[28][29]. The house itself becomes an artifact to be curated. This act is at once a defiant reclamation of narrative and a recognition of loss. “Palestinian grief and loss haunts these occupied houses. Subtly Sabella unearths this,” Muller notes – yet in doing so, he also displaces the material from its context, highlighting how fraught it is to preserve Palestinian memory “at the locus delicti” (the scene of the crime) under ongoing occupation[28][29]. Sabella himself has spoken of engaging in an “archaeology of the future”, one not about finding objects but “understanding images and their formation”[30][31]. In 38 Days of Re-Collection, he offers images as “imagined bridges, map-like structures that connect us to our past with an eye to the future”, even as they acknowledge that “human suffering is real, unlike the illusions I create”[30][31]. The series ultimately transcends the specifics of one family or house. By assembling fragments from different homes into “new neighboring aesthetic units,” Sabella creates a collage of a shared history – suggesting that “from the remains, new possibilities are composed”[32][33]. This vision of remixing the past into a possible future is key to Sabella’s distinctive voice. It is art as an act of healing historical amnesia, of liberating the image of Palestine from erasure. No wonder Kamal Boullata described Sabella’s work as “a dream to discover”, one that unfolds across “multiple layers of [the] past” and reveals how “perception [shapes] ‘reality’”[18].
Imagining Elsewhere: Collage and the Colonial Gaze
After 2014, Sabella’s practice underwent a shift: he began to “divorce [his] own narrative from the artworks” and embrace a more expansive, global visual language[34][35]. Nowhere is this more evident than in his recent conceptual and photographic collages, which appropriate historical images and cultural motifs to construct what one might call alternate realities. Sabella’s series Elsewhere (2020) and Everland (2020) exemplify this turn toward what he terms “looking at images to discover their hidden realities”[36]. In Elsewhere, Sabella gathered nineteenth-century photochrom prints of historic Palestine (early photographs painstakingly colorized to enhance their “reality”[37]) – as well as a few from Syria and Lebanon – and collaged them into new composite landscapes[36]. The title Elsewhere itself suggests a paradox: a place that exists only in imagination. “‘Elsewhere’ is a journey to the land that once was… the place that lives in our imagination,” Sabella says of the project[36]. By blending sepia-toned Holy Land vistas, he “recreat[es] the feeling of the place, as if one had traveled through a time machine and was suddenly present”[36]. The images invite a double take – they feel at once authentically old and uncannily new, a pastiche of memory. In Sabella’s words, he is pursuing “the archaeology of the image and its genealogy”, exploring how images from the past can be reassembled to unlock “infinite possibilities hidden in images”[38][39]. The Elsewhere collages, twenty plates in total, amount to what one reviewer called a “renaissance of culture and life constantly under erasure”[40]. By rescuing antique photographs from the archives and liberating them into imaginative recombinations, Sabella counters the colonial gaze that first produced many of these images. The 19th-century Western photographers sought to fix the Orient in romantic hues; Sabella upends their intent, using their own images to “stop focusing on [their] connection…with reality” and instead explore new meanings within the visual itself[41][39]. In doing so, he symbolically reclaims ownership of Palestine’s visual history, coloring outside the lines drawn by colonial narrative.
Parallel to this, Everland (2020) mines a different cultural repository – the rich tradition of Palestinian embroidery. In this series, Sabella created nine square panels as a “photo collage of Palestinian embroidery decorations” drawn from a variety of regional costumes[42][43]. The tiny cross-stitched motifs that for centuries have signified village identity and heritage are here cut, digitized, and woven anew in Sabella’s kaleidoscopic compositions. Everland is described as “a psychedelic, mesmerizing journey into Palestinian embroidery which becomes a new floral universe, blooming again to represent every other culture”[44]. Indeed, while the source patterns are distinctly Palestinian, Sabella’s collage technique lets them “penetrate deep into new borders, creating unique designs that look as if they represent every other culture”[43]. A red tatreez flower from Gaza might sit next to a Bethlehem star or a Hebron geometric motif, together forming a hybrid garden of stitches. In a sense, Everland enacts visually what Sabella often stresses philosophically: that “we are all from everywhere and nowhere,” all “citizens of planet Earth” in the end[45]. By reconfiguring a “disappearing tradition” of embroidery into a universal tapestry, Sabella celebrates Palestinian heritage while asserting its place in the global cultural mosaic[43]. Notably, Everland was conceived on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, during a multinational art initiative in Venice and Brussels aimed at countering extremism through collective imagination[46][47]. Sabella speaks of participants starting sentences with “and” instead of “but,” everyone adding to a shared vision[48]. This ethos of collaborative creation – the we over the I – infuses the spirit of Everland. Fittingly, whenever Everland is exhibited, Sabella rearranges the nine panels in a new constellation[49]. The work is thus “forever changing”, an “endless” permutation that underscores the idea of cultural identity as dynamic, interwoven, and alive[49].
Sabella’s most recent series push the collage principle even further, confronting the legacies of colonialism and power head-on. New Image Order (2024), for example, takes archival photochromes from the 19th and early 20th centuries – the very images by which imperial powers visually codified the world – and scrambles them into provocative new tableaux[37][50]. “Reordering images from fragments of the past challenges the boundaries of time and space,” Sabella writes in a statement on this work, inviting viewers into “a realm where history and fiction converge, where painting and photography meet.”[50] Here, the artist explicitly plays on the term “New World Order,” echoing its political connotations. In New Image Order, scenes from disparate geographies and eras merge on a single picture plane: “the world becomes a theater—where 19th-century photochromes return to the stage, performing new scenes”[51][52]. In one collage, a Russian folktale scene unfolds beneath a Washington, D.C., neoclassical ceiling[53]; in another, old German street photos are crowned by an imperial palace dome[54]. Elsewhere, “fragments of Egypt surface – reviving the visual codes of colonization” amid Pharaonic motifs[55]. The juxtapositions are jarring yet oddly cohesive, forming what Sabella calls “a new world… a reality within reality”[56][57]. By colliding empires and eras, he reveals how images have always been instruments of power – but also how they can be subverted. The assembled photos in New Image Order “offer a canvas for the past to coalesce with the present,” prompting us to ponder the “ever-evolving tapestry of our world”[50][58]. There is a strong utopian undercurrent: Sabella conjures “a space without borders” in which cultural symbols intermingle freely[56]. It is as if he were building an imaginative antidote to the carved-up, classified vision of the colonial atlas.
A standout in this vein is Sabella’s monumental piece The Great March of Return (2019). Created in response to the mass protests in Gaza demanding the right of return for Palestinians, the work is a digital fresco composed of over a thousand press photographs taken by local photojournalists[2][3]. Sabella mosaics these shots of “Palestinian flags, shouting protestors, burning tires” together with images of cosmic nebulae and star-fields[59]. The effect is breathtaking: a circular, mandala-like panorama where earthly struggle meets celestial infinity. Trapped in the “hermetically sealed” Gaza Strip, the protesters symbolically burst their confines and touch the heavens in Sabella’s art[60]. Some have likened the piece to “the Palestinian Sistine Chapel” – a ceiling of resistance and hope[2][61]. One curator observed that amidst “fires, smoke bombs, death, and destruction,” Sabella’s composition “connects to Renaissance art, creating a 'space without borders'… containing a message of rebirth”[62]. Here again Sabella “uses colors in photographic images [the way] a painter uses his brushes,” merging documentary realism with visionary fantasy to “create a new world” and “a journey to the beginning and the end of time.”[62] The political message is clear – The Great March of Return is about an “eternal fight for liberation”[59] – yet the form it takes is deliberately transcendent. By placing the struggle literally among the stars, Sabella asserts the universality of the quest for freedom. It is not only a Palestinian story, but a human one of cosmic proportions. In this sense, his recent collages complete the trajectory that began with In Exile: from the narrow walls of a room in London, his art has expanded to envision planetary vistas. The exile’s vision now encompasses the globe.
One World, One Imagination: The Artist’s Role Today
Across this journey from exile to Elsewhere, Sabella has maintained a philosophical through-line: the belief that imagination itself must be decolonized for true liberation to occur. In his award-winning memoir The Parachute Paradox (2016), subtitled Decolonizing the Imagination, Sabella recounts how he discovered the “colonised imagination” as a core obstacle for Palestinians[63][64]. After enduring life under occupation – “I felt the extreme psychological impact of what it means to be born under occupation, and live… a trapped reality”[65] – Sabella realized that many of his people “have reached a point where they cannot even imagine living in freedom, let alone liberate their land”[63]. The occupation, he writes, “attaches each Palestinian to an Israeli, as if in a tandem jump… in a never-ending hostage situation”[66]. Liberation, then, must start within: “I woke up to realize that what was forbidding the liberation of the land was that the people were occupied in their imagination,” Sabella told an interviewer[67]. “So I cleansed my imagination, declared my independence and gave myself a rebirth.”[67] This personal Declaration of Independence of the mind is at the heart of Sabella’s outlook. It echoes throughout his art – in the way he reconstructs images to break mental walls, and in the way he insists on hope amid darkness. Even No Man’s Land (2015), his apocalyptic triptych of a world drowning in decay, carries a cautionary optimism: “This piece inspires us to imagine the beauty of our world and see beyond its surface, especially today when everything is in flux,” he affirms[68][69]. Imagination, for Sabella, is not an escape from reality but a toolkit to change reality. It is the act of picturing freedom – of injecting into ourselves “the image of a better world” – that precedes the achievement of freedom[70].
Sabella’s voice is distinctive in contemporary art precisely because it fuses the political and the poetic through this concept of imagination. He is an artist-activist whose medium is vision itself. “Artists are the most equipped to feel the pulse of nations, and later transform these vibrations into great art,” Sabella notes, “art without identity, so that everyone can identify with it.”[71] In other words, he strives to create images that, while rooted in the Palestinian experience, resonate on a human level – artworks that transcend identity even as they honor it. “Only such art can survive the pages of time,” he adds[71]. Indeed, Sabella’s art, with its vibrant colors and bold shapes, carries an immediate visual impact that invites anyone’s eye[72]. At times his collages feel almost surreal or otherworldly, yet they remain recognizable and mysterious at once[72]. This balance allows them to speak across cultural boundaries. By “suppressing neither expulsion nor salvation” – neither the pain of exile nor the possibility of redemption – Sabella’s work attains a poetic universality[73]. It is notable that he often refers to himself as a mediator. In one recent statement, he described his artistic process as stripping away noise and distraction to reach the “minerals of our essence…our soul,” believing that “the soul does not like to be lied to”[74][75]. Honesty, clarity, and essence are his guiding lights. Little wonder that in the tumult of 2020 he proclaimed, “We are in the era of something new – change, opportunity, creativity, imagination… The time has come to stop drawing borders and start drawing our future. And the future is now.”[76][70].
Ultimately, Steve Sabella’s art tells a story of finding home in the most profound sense: not a physical home, but a home in one’s vision of the world. His journey from In Exile to Everland is the journey of an artist stitching together a fragmented self and a fragmented homeland, and in the process revealing a larger tapestry of human experience. What do his works tell us about perception? They urge us to realize that perception is never neutral – it is shaped by who holds the camera and who frames the scene. Sabella reclaims the frame, whether by literally recasting colonial photographs or by breaking the frame entirely into collage. What do they say about displacement? That displacement is not just a political condition but a psychic rift – one that art can articulate and perhaps even mend by keeping memories alive. About the colonial gaze? That it can be subverted and “unsettled” – Sabella’s projects like Palestine UNSETTLED (as he titled a 2020 publication) aim to unfix the image of Palestine from the frozen narratives of occupier vs. occupied[77]. His works insist on seeing Palestine beyond trauma, through a lens of creativity and resilience. About life and the role of the artist today? Sabella reminds us that the artist is a visionary in the literal sense: one who sees differently. In a world overwhelmed by images and yet starved for truth, his art poses a challenge and an invitation. It asks us to look harder – at the cracks in a wall, at the patterns in a costume, at the faces in a crowd – and to imagine what could be. “In the end, it is One World. One Heart,” Sabella says[78][79]. “We are all from elsewhere!”[45]. This startling, beautiful idea resonates in every collage and photograph he creates. Steve Sabella’s art penetrates the heart and mind by showing that even in exile, one can find an ever land – a forever place – in the unlimited territory of the imagination. It is there, in that liberated image-space, that the artist maps out the future and invites us all to step in.
Sources: Steve Sabella’s writings and interviews, and critical analyses of his work[1][6][20][43][63][56]. The above essay draws on publications including Steve Sabella – Photography 1997–2014, The Parachute Paradox, and exhibition texts and interviews to provide an independent interpretation of Sabella’s artistic journey.
[1] [2] [3] [19] [24] [26] [59] STEVE SABELLA - Artists | Dalloul Art Foundation
https://dafbeirut.org/en/steve-sabella
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https://stevesabella.space/pages/new-image-order
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https://stevesabella.space/pages/in-exile
[6] [8] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] Steve Sabella’s “In Exile” and “Metamorphosis”: From Alienation to Transformation – On Art and Aesthetics
[20] [21] [22] [23] [25] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [73] 38 Days of Re-Collection – SteveSabella.Space
https://stevesabella.space/pages/38-days-of-re-collection
[34] [35] [43] [44] [49] STEVE SABELLA: EVERLAND | XIBT Contemporary Art Magazine
https://www.xibtmagazine.com/2021/05/steve-sabella-everland/
[36] [38] [39] [40] [41] Elsewhere – SteveSabella.Space
https://stevesabella.space/pages/elsewhere
[42] [46] [47] [48] everland – SteveSabella.Space
https://stevesabella.space/pages/everland
[45] [63] [64] [65] [67] [68] [69] [70] [71] [74] [75] [78] [79] ‘The era of essence, imagination and hard work’: interview with Palestinian artist Steve Sabella – Middle East Monitor
[56] [57] [60] [61] [62] The Great March of Return – SteveSabella.Space
https://stevesabella.space/pages/the-great-march-of-return
[66] THE PARACHUTE PARADOX — Decolonizing The Imagination Softcover | Hardc – SteveSabella.Space
https://stevesabella.space/pages/the-parachute-paradox
[72] About – SteveSabella.Space
https://stevesabella.space/pages/about
[76] The Era of Essence, Imagination and Hard Work | Interview with Palesti – SteveSabella.Space
[77] Decolonizing the Palestinian imagination - Mondoweiss
https://mondoweiss.net/2022/10/decolonizing-the-palestinian-imagination/