Edition of 1001
The Great March of Return Detail
2019 · 84.1 × 59.4 cm
Archival inkjet print on fine art paper
Signed and numbered by Steve Sabella
Shown framed. Print supplied unframed.
View price & acquirePhotographic collage · 2019
The Great
March
of Return
A circle joining Gaza to the cosmos.
2019 · 200 cm diameter · Matt Diasec
Artwork details & availability
The artworkA space
A space
without borders.
In The Great March of Return, Steve Sabella brings together more than a thousand photographs from Gaza with images of outer space. Made by five Palestinian photojournalists during the Great March of Return demonstrations, the photographs are cut and reassembled with images of the cosmos into a single circular photocollage. Documentary fragments lose their original borders without losing their intensity: smoke drifts into nebulae, figures appear among the stars, and a landscape defined by earthly limits opens onto an apparently boundless field.
From a distance, the composition appears almost celestial. As the viewer approaches, individual gestures, faces and moments emerge. The Great March of Return holds these two scales at once — the immediate and the cosmic — placing a specific human reality within an image that seems to exceed the limits of place and imagination.
PhotographsAshraf Amra · Mohammed Asad · Atieh Darwish · Majdi Fathi · Mustafa Mohamad
“Between fires, smoke bombs, death, and destruction, the great circle connects to Renaissance art, creating a ‘space without borders’ that makes one think of a sort of a Palestinian Sistine Chapel, containing a message of rebirth.”
Daniela BrignoneBLOCKS · Museo Riso · Albergo delle Povere, Palermo
In the worldThe image,
The image,
encountered.
Two metres in diameter.
Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris
The photobook
The Great March
of Return
One image.
34 encounters.
Hardcover with dust jacket
30 × 30 cm · 74 pages · Emaginity
Recipient of an AFAC grant
PalestineUNSETTLED
130 photographs. No captions. A journey through Palestine during the Second Intifada.
Discover the projectSteve Sabella
Steve Sabella is a Jerusalemite artist based in Berlin. He begins with photographs, then refuses to let them stay where history placed them. His practice is an archaeology of the image: cutting, excavating and reconstructing photographs to uncover what lies beneath their visible surface — memory, displacement, hidden histories and other possible realities. Across photography, collage, film, text and installation, Sabella explores how images can carry the past without remaining confined by it, opening instead onto the possibility of decolonizing the imagination.
Click here for biography
Palestinian embroidery reimagined
Everland
Palestinian embroidery opens into new visual worlds.
Discover the workInto words
The Parachute
Paradox
Decolonizing the Imagination
Steve Sabella’s award-winning memoir The Parachute Paradox traces a life shaped by occupation, exile, love and the struggle to liberate the imagination. First published by Kerber Verlag in 2016, it received the Gold Nautilus Book Award for memoir and the Eric Hoffer Book Award.
“A thought-provoking, compelling and beautifully crafted memoir.”Joanna BarakatDiscover The Parachute Paradox
A Palestinian literary reading
“The Parachute Paradox offers narrative storytelling of the life of the Jerusalemite artist and his experiences under Israeli occupation. It proposes a subject that is unprecedented in Palestinian literature: the liberation of the self and the homeland through the liberation of the imagination.”
Mohammed Al-Asaad (1944–2021)Palestinian poet, novelist and criticAl-Araby Al-Jadeed, London
Signed & numbered editions
Live with the image.
Edition of 30
Everland Detail
2020 · 63 × 76 cm (paper size)
Archival pigment print on fine art paper
Signed and numbered by Steve Sabella
Shown framed. Print supplied unframed.
View price & acquire