Pap Souleye Fall
© Arthur Pequin
From an early age, Pap Souleye Fall (born in the United States in 1994) was immersed in the popular cultures of both the United States and Senegal. Manga, Black cosplay, and video games became enduring influences that continue to shape the core of the artist’s visual language. Drawing on speculative fiction, subcultural aesthetics, and online fandoms, Fall develops a practice rooted in world-building. Borrowing narrative strategies from video games and comics, the artist constructs a fictional universe where digital and popular cultures intersect.
DEAD PIXEL—the universe of which Pap Souleye Fall is both creator and protagonist—is a constellation of characters, images, and symbols drawn from media visual culture and cosplay, whose meanings remain in constant flux. This world is structured around a recurring set of narratives, motifs, and ideas that permeate the artist’s work. In computing, a “dead pixel” is a black point that appears on a screen when a hardware component fails, permanently disrupting the image. In Fall’s practice, the dead pixel becomes a metaphor for systemic dysfunctions and the fractures that shape social realities. Through this figure, the artist opens new possibilities for imagining and narrating contemporary dynamics of visibility and invisibility.
A continuous flux emerges, linking the most diverse elements through installation, comics, games, and performance. Within these works, the artist stages themself, dressed in green costumes that evoke both chroma key backdrops and the dead pixel—a malfunctioning point that disappears, leaving only a void in its wake. Fall thus destabilizes their own identity, almost effacing themself to make room for speculation and fiction as fleeting possibilities. Their presence becomes blurred between digital space and the physical world, oscillating constantly between appearance and disappearance.
The body of work developed around the peanut is emblematic of Pap Souleye Fall’s practice. Using cardboard and plastic containers, the artist constructs oversized peanut shells that alternately resemble spacecraft and shifting architectural structures. Through these monumental peanuts, Fall evokes the history of Senegal’s peanut monoculture, with its intertwined narratives of economic prosperity and exploited labor, drawing on Jori Lewis’s book Slaves for Peanuts. Beyond historiography, these works function as vessels for found objects, popular visual culture, and the artist’s personal archives, poised to be launched into the metaverse. Fall places particular importance on the notion of the prototype, preferring to describe these works as such in order to preserve their potential for constant transformation and evolution.
Objects marked by intercontinental circulation reappear throughout the artist’s work. Fall explores how such objects are perceived within popular culture, notably through the recurring use of matchboxes widely distributed in Senegal and emblazoned with the phrase “Manufactured in Sweden, Sold in Senegal.” Through cosplay and the visual codes of video games, the artist appropriates these stereotypical depictions of an exoticized Africa, freeing them from an intensely colonial gaze. In this process, the “dead pixel” becomes both an imagined character and a space of refuge.
Throughout their work, Fall incorporates the countless forms of contemporary Senegalese realities into the fictional universe they construct. Their often absurd détournements (re-orientation)disrupt any linear mode of perception. Ultimately, Fall invites viewers to enter into the realm of speculation themselves.
Works
NIT, NITAAY GARAMBAM, 2025, Cardboard and found materials, Dimensions variable
PIXELATEDPALM, 2025, Installation with wooden cleat, clamps, dried palm leaves plastic shading, cardboard, wooden books and tape
Performance at Académie des Mutantes, CAPC Bordeaux, France, 2026
NITTÉ MOY GARABAM, 2025, Installation of cardboard, recycled plastic, wooden board with various objects (8 modules), 950x450x350CM
NEW HEART, 2025, Wood, plastic and screws, 186x120 CM
Performance and film, HOUSEDROP, 2023
Performance Suffring n’ Smiling, 2017
Biography
© Lilah Benetti
Pap Souleye Fall is a Senegalese-American artist, born in 1994 in the USA. They explore the transmedia potentials of sculpture, installation, performance, cosplay, digital media, and comics. In 2022, they graduated with a Masters in Sculpture from Yale School of the Arts following studies at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Now they are working from Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York. Drawing on speculative fiction, subcultural aesthetics, and online fandoms, Fall develops a practice rooted in world-building. Borrowing narrative strategies from video games and comics, the artist constructs a fictional universe where digital and popular cultures intersect.
Their work has featured in solo exhibitions sucha as: HIDDENINPLAINSIGHT, Stellarhighway, Brooklyn, New York (2025), INANUTSHELL, Blade Study, New York, New York (2025), BLUR NEGATIVE SPACES OR and D, Marginal Utility, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2024), SEEINGDOUBLE: Pap Souleye Fall, Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2024), ITAINTTHATDEEP, Gratin, New York, New York (2023), Greenscreen Vortex as Digestive Engine for Digital Matter and Matter, Icebox Project Space, Marginal Utility, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2023), Doomu Dëkk, Galerie Éthiopiques, Saint-Louis, Senegal (2018), and TAKE ME, Storage Unit, Vox Populi, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2018).
They have also taken part in numerous collective exhibitions, such as, “Blackgrounds. Murmures des Mornes”, at CAPC Bordeaux, France (2026); “On Other Terms”, Subtitled NYC, Brooklyn, New York (2026); “IM/MOBILE”, Selebe Yoon, Dakar, Senegal (2025–2026); “Too Bright to Feel”, Mixed Media Space, North Adams, Massachusetts (2025); “otherwise”, Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Maine (2025); “Spaces & Places”, Friedrichs Pontone, New York, New York (2025); “Barnett’s Candelabra”, Below Grand, New York, New York (2025); “Veronica, Veronica”, Hesse Flatow, Amagansett, New York (2025); “Contact Sport”, Canada, New York, New York (2025); “Industrial Dry”, Jack Barrett Gallery, New York, New York (2025); “Block Universe”, Turley Gallery, Hudson, New York (2025); “GIS GIS”, gardeHouse, Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania (2025); “Mad Black Phantasms”, Picture Theory, New York, New York (2024); “Encounters”, Blaise Senghor Cultural Center, Dakar, Senegal (2024); “House Warming”, Bloko 748, Venice, Italy (2024); “</cascading error//errant catalyst/>”, The Arts League, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2023); “APRiL (Artists Prospering Really is Limitless)”, Omola Studio, New Haven, Connecticut (2023); “In the Weeds: Camouflage and Its Discontent”, Houseguest Gallery, Louisville, Kentucky (2022–2023); “Next Day Soup”, Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut (2022); “Brought it Home: A Continuum”, Afro-American Cultural Center, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (2022); “March Zine”at RAW Material Company, Dakar, Senegal (2020); and traveling exhibitions “The View from Here” at Waru Studio, Dakar, Senegal (2018), the Wright Museum of Art, Beloit, Wisconsin (2018), the Center for Visual Arts Gallery, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio (2019), and Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, Stony Brook, New York (2019), “VOX XIII: Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”, Vox Populi, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2017), “5 into 1”, The Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2017), and “Teacher don’t teach me nonsense”, Arronson Gallery, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2017).
They have benefited from numerous fellowships and awards, including the Dedalus Foundation Fund for Past Fellows & Awardees (2023), the Black Rock Fellowship (2023), the Ilab Fellowship (2023), and the Dedalus Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2022), the Alice Kimball Travel Grant at Yale University (2021). In 2017, they were honoured with the Florence Whistler Fish Award for Student Excellence, the Sculpture Faculty Award, and the Philadelphia Sculpture Award at The University of the Arts, where they had previously received the Crozier Prize Fund for Outstanding Achievement by a First‐Year Student (2014).
Exhibitions
"Im/mobile", Selebe Yoon, Dakar, Senegal 2025-2026
On other terms, Subtitled Inc., New York, USA, 2026
On other terms, Subtitled Inc., New York, USA, 2026
OTHERWISE, ICA Maine, Portland, USA, 2025
INANUTSHELL, Blade Study, New York, USA, 2025
"Encounters", Black Rock Exhibition curated by Jareh Das, Centre Blaise Senghor, Dakar, Senegal, 2024
IT AINT THAT DEEP, Gratin, New York, USA, 2023