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The book is divided into sixteen visual journeys, chronicling the artist’s trademark “mental images” replicated from memories of an artist living under occupation, exile and liberation, offering up a rich pattern of abstractions. Quotations from celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish are sprinkled throughout the book, providing a palpable link between past and present.Of particular interest is Sabella’s progress from witness to exile to freedom and, finally, independence. According to von Amelunxen, Sabella’s artwork speaks directly to modern-day concerns, such as displacement and migration.

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This 208-page hardback cover is Steve Sabella’s first monograph, which looks at the Palestinian artist’s work over the last two decades. The cover is a detail of a work from 2014 entitled Sinopia. “I wanted the text on the cover to be as discreet as possible, because I wanted the work to speak for itself.”

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Interspersed with the collections of Sabella’s photographs are the sections of an extended essay by von Amelunxen. He offers often illuminating readings of Sabella’s art, and places the work into context — both biographical and in relation to Palestinian art and literature. Citing the likes of poet Mahmoud Darwish, intellectual Edward Said and Boullata, as well as philosophers Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, von Amelunxen draws out some of the themes suggested by Sabella’s visual explorations. Coming from a very established position in the European art hierarchy, von Amelunxen’s text is a fine example of how, while fully acknowledging the politics that affect the positioning of any Palestinian artist, Palestinian creativity still stands up to the most rigorous examinations of art criticism.

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"The monograph surveys Sabella’s astonishingly rich body of work, whose formal diversity shatters the illusion of a monolithic Palestinian experience just as its abstractions speak of the shared realities of oppression and resistance."

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