Steve Sabella · Planet Earth

Steve Sabella

Planet Earth

Planet Earth I, framed with a white mat.
Planet Earth VI, framed with a white mat.
Planet Earth VII, framed with a white mat.

Planet Earth is a series of photocollages made from satellite views of our world. From above, Earth is both image and territory — beautiful, measured, governed. Rivers begin to look like brushstrokes, colours soften into pastel, and land can become almost otherworldly.

Sabella treats these satellite images as a palette of colour, texture and form. He reframes them, brings distant places together and changes their scale. Slowly, geography gives way to atmosphere. What emerges is no longer quite a map, but a landscape that belongs to no single place, offering another way of seeing.

An aesthetic excavation: looking down to look within.

02 / The worksSelect a work to look closer

Eight fragments.One planet.No single point of view.

Planet Earth I60 × 30 cm
Planet Earth VI80 × 60 cm
Planet Earth IV100 × 77 cm

In Planet Earth, archaeology changes direction. Instead of digging into the ground, Sabella looks down upon it.

The idea of excavation has moved through Sabella’s work for more than three decades — first through stone and walls, later through archives and inherited images. Here, the excavation reaches another kind of surface: the satellite image itself. What is being opened up is not the Earth, but the way we have learned to see it.

The excavation has moved from the ground to the image.

Planet Earth II90 × 50 cm
Planet Earth III75 × 43 cm
Planet Earth V50 × 60 cm
Planet Earth VII100 × 100 cm
Planet Earth VIII120 × 73 cm
Planet Earth artworks around an open double doorway, inviting a view into the next room.

Works &
Production

The exhibition comprises eight works from Planet Earth.

All artworks are priced at 8,000 euros.

The proposed presentation uses black frames with white mats. To simplify production and reduce transport costs, framing can be carried out locally in Berlin.

Proposed work dimensions · width × height
WorkDimensions
Planet Earth I60 × 30 cm
Planet Earth II90 × 50 cm
Planet Earth III75 × 43 cm
Planet Earth IV100 × 77 cm
Planet Earth V50 × 60 cm
Planet Earth VI80 × 60 cm
Planet Earth VII100 × 100 cm
Planet Earth VIII120 × 73 cm

100%

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About

About the exhibition

Planet Earth belongs to a much longer investigation in Steve Sabella’s practice into photography, excavation, and the histories carried by images.

The idea of archaeology first entered his work physically.

Till the End — 2004

Till The End, 2004, British Museum Collection

In Till the End, photographic emulsion was applied directly onto Jerusalem stone. The photograph no longer existed only as an image of a place; it entered the material body of that place. Stone and photograph carried different measures of time, yet became one surface.

The work marked an early shift in Sabella’s practice. Photography was beginning to move away from simply recording the world and toward something that could be excavated, touched, layered and reconstructed.

A decade later, in 38 Days of Re-Collection, Sabella returned to walls in Jerusalem’s Old City, including the house in which he was born. He removed fragments of paint and plaster and coated them with light-sensitive photographic emulsion. Photographs could then be exposed and developed directly on these pieces of wall.

The excavation was literal. Layer after layer carried traces of time, lives and memory.

What began as an excavation of walls became an excavation of images.

From this point, archaeology gradually moved away from matter alone. The photograph itself became a surface that could be entered, broken apart and questioned.

In Elsewhere, Sabella turned to nineteenth-century photochromes of historic Palestine, alongside images from Syria and Lebanon. Originally black-and-white photographs, these images had been coloured in the nineteenth century to make distant places appear more immediate and more real.

Sabella entered that inherited visual record and rearranged it. Rather than treating the archive as fixed evidence, he looked into the images for what they might still contain.

Here, archaeology had moved decisively into the photograph itself — into its origins, transformations and visual genealogy. Sabella described this investigation as an “archaeology of the image and its genealogy.”

That search continued in New Image Order. Working with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photochromes, Sabella broke historical images into fragments and brought them into new relationships.

The past is not kept safely behind glass. It re-enters the present.

History and fiction begin to overlap. Images once used to construct ideas of place, culture and identity are dismantled and made to perform differently. The archive becomes material rather than authority.

Across these works, archaeology becomes a way of looking at photographs themselves: uncovering their layers, tracing where they came from, questioning what they claim to show, and asking what else might still be hidden inside them.

Planet Earth reverses the archaeologist’s gesture.

In Planet Earth, archaeology changes direction. Instead of digging into the ground, Sabella looks down upon it.

The source material comes from satellite views — images made to survey, measure and render the planet legible.

Sabella removes them from that original function. He cuts, reframes and recombines distant terrains until their coordinates begin to lose importance. Rivers become gestures. Agricultural grids move toward abstraction. Land slips between geography and atmosphere.

The excavation is no longer of a buried physical past. It reaches into the image through which the Earth has already been organised and presented to us.

From high above, the planet can appear almost borderless. Look closer and its surfaces reveal intervention, movement and human presence.

Planet Earth does not offer another map.

It asks what becomes visible when systems of mapping and measurement no longer have the final word on how the world is seen.

An aesthetic excavation: looking down to look within.

About Steve Sabella

Steve Sabella (b. Jerusalem, Palestine, 1975) is an artist and author based in Berlin. For almost three decades, his work has questioned the apparent certainty of the photographic image — how images shape our understanding of place, memory and reality, and what happens when their inherited meanings are opened and rearranged.

His relationship with photography began in Jerusalem, where he completed three years of study at the Musrara School of Photography in 1997. He later earned a BA in Visual Studies with distinction from the State University of New York, followed by an MA in Photographic Studies from the University of Westminster in London. A Chevening Scholar, he received the Caparo Award of Distinction as the programme’s top graduating student. He subsequently completed an MA in Art Business at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London as a Saïd Foundation Scholar.

Across photography, collage, installation and writing, Sabella has developed a practice in which the image is not treated as neutral evidence. It can be cut, displaced, repeated, excavated and reconstructed. Stone, architecture, the body, archives and historical photographs have all become sites through which he examines how realities are visually produced and carried forward.

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In 2010, Sabella was commissioned for Told, Untold, Retold, the inaugural exhibition of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha. In 2014, the International Center of Photography Scavi Scaligeri in Verona presented his retrospective Archaeology of the Future. That same year, Hatje Cantz and the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, published the monograph Steve Sabella Photography 1997–2014, with texts by Hubertus von Amelunxen and Kamal Boullata.

His work has since been presented internationally, including at the British Museum, Maison Européenne de la Photographie and Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, Les Rencontres de la photographie in Arles, FotoFest Houston and Art Paris at the Grand Palais. His works are held in collections including the British Museum, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Institut du Monde Arabe, Bahrain National Museum, Barjeel Art Foundation, Dalloul Art Foundation and Ars Aevi Museum of Contemporary Art.

Writing gradually became another space in which Sabella could pursue the same questions. His memoir, The Parachute Paradox: Decolonizing the Imagination, received the Eric Hoffer Book Award and the Nautilus Book Award. His later book, The Artist’s Curse | The Artist’s Cure, turns the investigation toward artistic autonomy, the structures of the art world and the inner life of the artist.

Since 2024, Sabella has taught The Art Practice | From Vision to Action at the Barenboim–Said Akademie in Berlin.

In October 2026, his forthcoming solo exhibition Steve Sabella — The Liberated Image opens at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. The exhibition brings together several stages of a practice that has moved steadily from questioning what photographs represent toward a larger question: how images themselves participate in constructing the realities we inhabit.

Across these different forms, Sabella’s concern remains consistent. He does not approach photography simply as a way of representing the world, but as a place where the world can be taken apart, reconsidered, and imagined again.

Selected CV