Born in Jerusalem, Palestine, in 1975 and based in Berlin since 2010, Steve Sabella works across photography, photocollage and installation. For more than two decades, he has approached the photographic image not simply as a record of reality, but as material that can be cut, repeated, displaced and reconstructed. Through these transformations, his work explores how images shape memory, belonging and the imagination.
Nothing Still brings four bodies of work into conversation. Its title draws together the stillness of photography and the transformations that unfold within Sabella’s images. In the Palestinian context from which much of the work emerges, the words carry another resonance: a reality marked by displacement and fragmentation, where place, memory and belonging are continually unsettled. Yet still also carries the sense of persistence — still here, still remembered, still becoming.
Across the works, Sabella moves between the intimate and the planetary: Gaza opens onto the cosmos; the photographic archive is released from its original time and place; windows, walls and barbed wire are transformed through repetition; and Palestinian embroidery becomes the material for new visual territories. Underlying these works is a sustained inquiry into what happens when the image is no longer treated as fixed — when photography becomes a space in which reality itself can be reimagined.
In 2010, Sabella was one of twenty-three artists commissioned to create new work for Told | Untold | Retold, one of the inaugural exhibitions of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha. In 2008, he received the Ellen Auerbach Award for Photography from the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. The award led to the monograph Steve Sabella: Photography 1997–2014, published by Hatje Cantz, with core texts by Hubertus von Amelunxen and a foreword by Kamal Boullata.
His work is held in public collections including the British Museum, London; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; and the Institut du monde arabe, Paris.
The works presented here are already produced and exhibition-ready. Following Steve Sabella’s solo exhibition The Liberated Image at the Einstein Forum, Potsdam, 13 October 2026 – 13 March 2027, the works included in that exhibition can travel directly to a subsequent venue.
This offers the possibility of developing a new solo presentation without the substantial production requirements of building an exhibition from the beginning. The works can be reconfigured in response to a new architecture and curatorial context.
The gallery is an imagined exhibition. Artworks are shown at their stated dimensions within a modelled space. The accompanying installation and presentation images were supplied by the artist.
