Anri Sala's work has prompted numerous discussions as to whether he is a documentarian or a video artist, although Sala would argue that he is now firmly the latter. Just 30, the young Albanian can boast of an award-winning career as both, having won the prize for best documentary at the 2000 Williamsburg Brooklyn Film Festival as well as the Prix Gilles Dusein (2000) and the Young Artist Prize at the 2001 Venice Biennale. He has been nominated for the Hugo Boss and Marcel Duchamp prizes, and now the 2005 German National Gallery's prize for young art. In truth, it seems pointless to split Sala's output, which spans less than a decade, into an "early" documentary-style period and "later" video art. Moreover, his favored medium has always been the more modest digital camera, rather than 16mm film, and he continues to veer between short 2minute abstract pieces and 25-minute narrative works.

At Sala's solo show in Paris last spring, the daring installation had the effect of an all-encompassing experience rather than of a sequential stroll from one video to the next. Here was not the familiar sensation of being plunged into darkness, one video room at a time, periodically coming up for air and a quick burst of healing light before being dunked again into the flickering gloom of another booth. Instead, Sala devised a magical twilight encounter with his work in the Cordeliers convent in Paris, a place rich with architectural detail and historical associations. (The body of revolutionary writer Jean-Paul Marat lay in state there after his assassination, and it is also said to be the final resting place of Nostradamus.) Used by the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris while its own premises undergo renovation, the cavernous interior of the convent was left open and given over entirely to seven recent video pieces either projected directly onto walls or displayed on monitors. Sala also designed the installation at the show's second venue, Hamburg's Deichtorhallen, where he arranged the works in seven separate spaces in the gallery's vast, tunnel-like hall.