“There are still people who perceive Palestinian art in a militant and national way.” A leading figure of the new wave of Palestinian artists, Steve Sabella is reworking the image of Palestinian art. Conceptual and psychological, his photomontage series In Exile challenges the traditional approach to the Palestinian question. On the occasion of the exhibition Palestine, Creativity In All Its States, showing until Feb 10th at the Bahrain National Museum, Steve Sabella offers l’Agenda’s readers the key to viewing contemporary Palestinian art through a different lens.

“A major exhibition like this one probably happens once a decade.” Sabella isn’t exaggerating. The last rally of Palestinian artists on this scale took place in 1997, commissioned by the Arab World Institute (France). More than a decade later, the institute has repeated the feat. Once again it has brought together artists of different generations, many of them scattered around the world. More importantly, it reveals the evolution of contemporary Palestinian art. Videos, photomontages, installations: the variety of media used by the artists reflects not only an esthetic choice, but seems to affect how the politics are tackled.

Sabella in fact points out that "It is important at this point in history to see how Palestinian artists relate to the Question of Palestine or their perception of life from a personal perspective rather than a national perspective, something that categorized Palestinian art till the very early 1990s.” With sarcasm, humor and introspection, the artists of Palestine, Creativity In All Its States surprise us with their visions of the Palestinian conflict. Angst, solitude, madness. It isn’t bloody images of combat that give rise to these sentiments, but rather the five photomontages that make up Steve Sabella’s In Exile. How are a million small pictures of dark windows mounted one to the other related to Palestine? The artist's explanation strikes us as a laden one.

The windows are his catharsis: “When I left Jerusalem to go and live in London in 2007, my feelings of dislocation intensified. Lost in my immediate space and looking daily through my living room windows, I started to deconstruct my window view by photographing it from several angles.” The photomontage – his exile: “I only stopped piecing images together when I felt that the new structure I was creating mirrored the impossible reality I live in; being the state of mind of being in exile.” The result – his identity in pieces: “Each artwork appears complete, yet we know in its essence it is made up of pieces (cut images). This is me, my identity at once appears complete, but in essence it is fragmented and somehow I keep it together.”

By closely examining the wanderings of an exiled soul in a large Western city, In Exile rouses feelings with which we might all be familiar, regardless of nationality: “disorienting cityscapes, and a ‘visual vertigo’ that are also symptoms of our fast, hectic and busy world of today.” It’s ironic that in so distancing his presentation of the Palestinian conflict, the artist bluntly inserts us into the heart of his identity crisis. “The work is a journey to my mind or subconscious and I reached a dangerous level of self awareness just to discover that my ambivalent reconstructions are not making the world or my perception of it any simpler.” One can't help but once again be struck by the difficulty of expressing blurred and erased borders -- the borders of country, like those of a soul.

Stephanie Ravel (English translation by May Ashour)

For more info on the artist log on www.sabellaphoto.com