For Sala, the experience of entering a world that had once been inaccessible became inseparable from the question of how we perceive and understand it. Growing up in Albania under communism and later arriving in Paris, he encountered a plethora of unfamiliar artistic forms, as well as an entirely different set of lenses through which to make sense of the world. That tension between the known and the newly imaginable continues to run through his practice. Across sound, image, language, material and time, Sala explores the spaces between perception and intuition, intention and accident, the tangible and the immaterial. His works ask us to question and dissolve the reality of what we see and hear, and what might exist in the interval between them.

Akimov pursues the moment when reality reveals itself through the body, when a face dissolves beneath the light, losing its contours until it becomes something else. Raised in the Russian provinces and now immersed in the chaos of Paris, he describes his work as a wound that reopens every time he turns on the camera: an act of subtraction where colour disappears, leaving only the raw essence of the image. His subjects become witnesses to the real; he digs beneath the surface to reveal what remains.

A chatbot trained on real suicide helpline transcripts can produce what feels like warmth, turning the coldest possible source into a convincing simulation of care. Their latest work unfolds around this paradox, exposing how the distinction between human and machine is becoming increasingly engineered. We speak with them about fabrication, manipulation, and what remains of trust once belief and artificial intelligence become indistinguishable.