The new exhibition, his first in four years in Paris, is rooted in a sudden confrontation between the artist’s personal observations down the decades on urban geography and space, and the reality of a global pandemic. At the heart of the gallery, a Tadjik-inspired cabin offers a glimpse of rugs laid casually on the floor in a nod to the many thwarted journeys over the last couple of years. The artist wonders: “How did the epidemic restrict our physical freedom? What impact did the pandemic have on our perception of travel and our status as city dwellers?”

The answer he comes up with is an experimental game that plays with imposing “mental maps” that unfurl over several metres. At the back of the gallery, two painted walls and fifteen works – photographs, oils, water colours, acrylics, and drawings – offer an almost insolent dissonance, a “thirst for freedom in a world sorely lacking in it today.”

The basement space, on the other hand, plunges visitors into a striking and chaotic universe: six monumental oil paintings covered in video projections. Ackermann uses this silent carnival to explore the post-Covid world: “In an era of hyper-digitalisation and hyper-information, how do we now perceive the difference between reality and illusion? What has become of experiences described as ‘authentic’?”