Beyond translation: trained in France and based in Berlin, the Albanian artist Anri Sala specializes in films and videos featuring fraught situations in which language, and even light, can take us only so far

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.

In both cases, the whole space was carefully maintained in a state of half-light or, as the French title of the show characterizes it, "Entre chien et loup" (literally "between dog and wolf"), to indicate that stage at dusk when perception and recognition break down. In the catalogue, the artist described his wish "to extend this moment of time that normally lasts 15 minutes to the whole time of the exhibition, hour after hour and day after day." He achieved that intention by partially covering the windows and painting the walls a deadening gray that sucked up the light.

Utter darkness dominates Ghostgames (2002), in which a handheld camera follows the dizzying trajectories of ghost crabs (so-called because of their translucent carapaces) as they scuttle up and down a beach at night, chased by young boys with flashlights. There is indeed a game concocted by the humans around the frantic movements of the crabs. As the creatures vainly try to flee the bright lights, the boys use intermittent flashes and beams to urge a crab through the legs of the opponent, which once or twice results in a hushed exclamation of "Goal." Neither the rules, the context of this particular beach in North Carolina, nor Sala's exhaustive research (with specialists in Chile, Taiwan and Australia) into behavioral patterns of crabs is at all vital to the work's appreciation. What is striking is the pared-down field of vision that Sala presents: only the occasional sweeping or blinking yellow spotlight disturbs the almost black screen. This rhythmic, strobelike light, which co-curator Laurence Bosse describes in the catalogue as producing "blindness and bedazzlement," is part of Sala's own sophisticated visual Morse code, and switches between realism and abstraction as quickly as between light and dark. The most intriguing moments of the more than 9-minute-long Ghostgames are those when the digital camera has been unable to focus, and all recognizable imagery disappears, leaving a grainy, gray haze--a poetic, painterly echo of Renaissance sfumato.

The 8-minute video Mixed Behavior (2003) pictures a DJ, his back to us, playing music from a rooftop, hampered by a plastic sheet keeping the rain off his records. In front of him, a New Year's Eve celebration of fireworks lights up the sky above Tirana, Albania's capital. The shadowy figure and night sky are all but indiscernible until a fire-work goes off, the timing of which seems controlled by the choice and rhythm of the music. It is Sala himself, not the DJ, who has digitally orchestrated the pyrotechnics display to slow or start at different points, perhaps the performative equivalent of Andreas Gursky manipulating his photographs on the computer. Within this hypnotic collage, there are hints of Sala's political concerns, as the colorful, booming explosions overhead differ little from the rocket bursts above the rooftops where journalists report from war-torn cities, including those once engulfed by the bloody Balkan wars. Although the political edge is more obvious in Sala's earliest works, especially those shot in Albania, it is rarely overt. Any firm meaning, political or otherwise, in his later efforts surfaces and then disintegrates in much the same way that the DJ mixes songs. Sound and imagery are similarly interchangeable; when one fades out, the other takes over.