‘This story is completely true since I made it up from beginning to end,’ quotes the artist Boris Vian, and we cannot but agree. The work on view in PaperLab Gallery is a fiction that seems true—an imagined reality that can not only captivate the viewer, but will also hold them for a long time.

The exhibition is based on the pictures in a memorial album and the story that emerges from them. The hero of the story is a young man who died in World War II. The album was compiled by Dorirs Aiusy, the man’s widow, who died in 2006. In this album dedicated to the memory of her late husband, who died young, the events of his life are evoked by pictures from the past. You learn about D Uedd Udd’s ancestors; his childhood in Toe Fuhd, a village in the Republic of Blajssoane; his university years in Soortsavo, D Uedd Udd’s hobby, from which his professional interest also stemmed; his travels, his marriage, and the young couple’s home; the historical context of the war, how Blajssoane became involved in it; finally, Dorirs Aiusy says goodbye to D Uedd Udd, a young soldier killed at the front at the age of 23, with whom she could live together in peace and love for only a short time.

Where do you stop believing the beautiful story? What do you do with the people and places with the strange names that seem suspiciously unpronounceable? Spend enough time with the images of this exhibition—the gelatin silver prints, the pictures on the walls, the historical newspaper articles and maps—which came from the home of the Dorirs Aiusy, the widow who died in 2006 at the age of 84, and your suspicion will only grow. You may even spot the sleight of hand.

Because all the images in this exhibition were generated by artificial intelligence. The originally digital images were printed on tracing paper to make negatives, which were then contact-printed on old photographic paper, and these prints were subsequently distressed with the use of different mechanical and chemical procedures. The finished prints were placed in old frames and an emptied family album bought at a flea market. There are giveaway details waiting to be discovered, and they are of a surprising variety: they run the gamut from unusual and unsettling through confusing and absurd to amusing and irrational, and they are sometimes sentimental, reminiscent of the aesthetic of a bygone bourgeois world. What is common to them all is that they tread the narrow and often invisible, imperceptible borderland between fiction and reality with great confidence. The familiar form of the classic family album and the evocation (and simultaneous subversion) of other visual stereotypes carry the potential for collective connection.

Viewing the images generates a complex web of emotions. You wonder how it is possible to use prompts to make the characters age authentically, to make them look like themselves over time. What makes a fictitious story, a life that never was, real?