What happens when one uproots the self and plants it in the clouds?
In this talk, Steve Sabella reflects on how occupation moves from land into the body, memory and imagination. When occupation enters the imagination, where can liberation begin? Drawing on his photographic and collage practice, his writing, and Vilém Flusser’s understanding of images as active mediators of reality, he asks how inherited images can be examined, broken open and placed in new relationships.
Moving between autobiography, mythology and contemporary image-making, Sabella considers art as a series of checkpoints—stations in an ongoing process of self-liberation. Mythology enters not as an escape from reality, but as a way of giving form to what reality has made difficult to see. The screening of The Great March of Return brings documentary photographs from Gaza into relation with images of outer space, joining the immediate and the cosmic. A sealed geography opens into a boundless field, without erasing the wound that gave rise to it.
The liberated image is not an image about freedom; it is freedom working inside the image. The talk asks what becomes possible when images are no longer confined to their origins. Somewhere between what he makes and what viewers see, another image becomes possible.
Steve Sabella: The Liberated Image (PDF)

With a reception and a viewing of the exhibition, followed by the artist’s talk.