13.10.2026 – 13.03.2027

Arbeiten von Steve Sabella, Jerusalem/Berlin

The Liberated Image explores how images shape perception, memory, identity and the limits of what can be imagined. Born in Jerusalem, Palestine, under Israeli occupation, Sabella describes the process through which imposed images enter consciousness as the colonization of the imagination. An image of who we are can become the boundary of what we believe we can become. Even after leaving Jerusalem, the image of being occupied travelled with him, as though the checkpoints had moved inside. His art becomes a series of personal checkpoints—stations in an ongoing process of self-liberation. His collages take images apart and place their fragments in new relationships, moving them beyond their assigned meanings.

The exhibition brings together four distinct bodies of work. In Metamorphosis, barbed wire passes through the image like a thread stitching wounds. In another work, what resembles the Separation Wall dissolves, becoming fluid; forms associated with confinement begin to loosen their hold on perception. Elsewhere returns to nineteenth-century photochromes of historic Palestine, alongside images from Syria and Lebanon. Sabella reworks these inherited views to recover a relationship with a land and a past he never directly experienced, while reshaping images made through other eyes into a visual language of his own.

In The Great March of Return, more than one thousand photographs taken by five Palestinian photojournalists in Gaza are placed in relation to images of outer space. A sealed geography opens into infinity, giving the events renewed imaginative life. Everland follows Palestinian embroidery, where stitches pass between generations. These inherited stitches carry Palestine across time, linking memory and lived experience to cultures far beyond its borders.

Sabella’s practice examines how images accumulate histories and how changing their relationships can open new possibilities. The liberated image carries its origins without being confined to them. It remains open to meanings beyond the artist’s intentions, and to the memories, histories and ways of seeing each viewer brings to it.

Somewhere between what he makes and what viewers see, another image becomes possible.

See also the talk by the artist on November 26, 2026, with a reception and a viewing of the exhibition.