Pap Souleye Fall

Pap Souleye Fall is a Senegalese American artist and a recent graduate of the Yale School of Art. Their multidisciplinary output spans the realms of video, performance, comic book art, and cosplay.

Fall is deeply influenced by the community, world-building, and self-fashioning associated with internet subcultures and online fandoms—specifically the Black Otaku community. They conceive of their art, in turn, as akin to fan art—as DIY “merch” or “cosplay” for the imaginary narratives that undergird their oeuvre. In this sense, Fall’s work is less a traditional art practice than an ever-expanding cosmology of images and objects that shifts and flows in evolving constellations of meaning. For Fall, the modalities of speculative fiction, gameplay, and comics are potent creative engines, providing strategies by which members of the African diaspora might navigate and transcend systems of global oppression.

Born in 1994 in the U.S. but growing up in Senegal, Fall spent their upbringing immersed in manga and video games. In 2022, Fall published the first volume of Oblivion Rouge, a dystopian graphic novel that follows a pair of female protagonists as they battle a threat to a futuristic Africa. With a graphic style modeled after Japanese manga but featuring an all-African cast, the narrative foregrounds themes of decolonization, neocolonialism, and pandemic-era violence, borrowing the psychological richness and character development of manga to communicate a specifically African story. With its first volume released as Fall was beginning their graduate studies, Oblivion Rouge was also a creative watershed, allowing Fall to understand the craft of worldbuilding—that is, the process of refining and developing a fictional sci-fi space—as a model for their nascent art practice.

This ethos of worldbuilding has been key to DEAD PIXEL, a growing cluster of ideas and images that form the conceptual spine of Fall’s recent and ongoing work. Broken LED screens, a Swedish-manufactured matchbox for sale in Senegal, chroma key green: From the associative links between these items, Fall has engendered a multifarious universe encompassing brightly colored reliefs and tapestries; quasi-architectural environments full of wooden books; and chroma key green bodysuits festooned with pearls, cowrie shells, and peanut shells. With these works—and via the repeated invocation of the so-called green-screen—Fall explores dynamics of visibility and invisibility, opacity and fugitivity as they merge with the physical and virtual spaces of the present.

Fall’s work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions, most recently at Stellarhighway (2025, New York), Blade Study (2025, New York), Marginal Utility (2024, Philadelphia), Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery (2024, Philadelphia), Gratin (2023, New York), and Galerie Éthiopiques (2018, Senegal). They have also appeared in group exhibitions at Mixed Media Space (2025, North Adams, Massachusetts), Institute of Contemporary Art (2025, Portland, Maine), Below Grand (2025, New York), Canada (2025, New York), and Hesse Flatow (2025, Amagansett, New York), among many other galleries and institutions.