List Projects 35: Pap Souleye Fall

In Pap Souleye Fall’s practice, technological error serves as a space of refuge, concealed from larger systems of control. 

An artist who also makes comic books, Fall has recently created work that emerges from the world of DEAD PIXEL (2020–ongoing) a narrative articulated through installation, performance, drawing, sculpture, video, and comics. Often used by gamers, the term “dead pixel” describes the black spots that appear on a screen when hardware fails and a pixel permanently goes dark, thus disrupting the continuous, smooth image of a video game. Fall imagines these malfunctions as portals to hidden realms of autonomy, as a way of exploring the dynamics of visibility and invisibility that shape contemporary society.

The story of DEAD PIXEL follows its titular protagonist as he eludes THE DATA COLLECTOR, a villain who aims to acquire DEAD PIXEL’s senses via their associated organs. At first, DEAD PIXEL willingly gave THE DATA COLLECTOR his eyes, ears, mouth, and skin before realizing this generosity was one-sided. He then hid his nose—and his final sense—before sewing himself a new green-screen skin that endowed him with an extraordinary capacity for camouflage. Driven by these characters’ antagonism, DEAD PIXEL is an allegory of contemporary surveillance. Fall treats data (via its DEAD PIXEL analogue, the senses) as a precious material, likening it to the soul and to the wealth of knowledge we each hold in personal, collective, or cultural forms.

In NOMANISANISLAND REDIRTRENDER (2026)—Fall’s new installation—the world of DEAD PIXEL takes shape in sculptures made out of e-waste collected from MIT’s campus, wooden scaffolding, and organic papier-mâché objects embedded with found material. Inspired by work they began in 2023 while a resident at the Recycled Artist in Residency (RAIR) in Philadelphia, the installation places DEAD PIXEL and THE DATA COLLECTOR in what Fall describes as “the endless digestive system of digital space”: a structure that accounts for both virtual worlds and their material effects, such as data centers, electronic waste, and landfills. NOMANISANISLANDREDIRTRENDER transforms residues of hyper-consumption into a lush environment where things that were thrown away come back into view. Intricate drawings done on defunct monitors and small hinged wooden books integrate the DEAD PIXEL story into the exhibition, while gesturing toward Fall’s long-term vision of a DEAD PIXEL and THE DATA COLLECTOR library—thousands of volumes that build on their multilayered world. 

Questions of social control and technology run through DEAD PIXEL alongside ideas of fugitivity—elaborated by thinkers such as Fred Moten—which describe forms of Black life, thought, and creativity that refuse capture by dominant systems of power. These ideas appear within the dynamics of pursuit and evasion that drive the story, as well as through historical referents incorporated into Fall’s objects. Patchwork textile motifs, for example, draw on the quilt patterns used on the Underground Railroad to convey messages to those escaping enslavement, while recurring peanut forms invoke the crop’s intimate ties to colonialism and slavery in West Africa. These moments root Fall’s practice in centuries-long histories of strategic resistance and liberation. 

Across the exhibition, Fall’s work insists on the power of spaces that lie outside of view—those that preserve and shelter knowledge and self-determination, or, by contrast, obscure the inner workings of extractive processes. DEAD PIXEL sharpens the stakes of what it means to move through the world unseen.

List Projects 35: Pap Souleye Fall is organized by Marina Caron, Assistant Curator.

Pap Souleye Fall (b. 1994, Washington, DC) is a Senegalese-American artist based in New York. They have had solo and two-person exhibitions at Subtitled NYC, New York (2026); Stellarhighway, New York (2025); Blade Study, New York (2025); Marginal Utility, Philadelphia (2024); Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia (2024); Gratin, New York (2023); and Galerie Éthiopiques, Saint-Louis, Senegal (2018). Their work has appeared in group exhibitions at CAPC Bordeaux, France (2026); Selebe Yoon, Dakar, Senegal (2025); Mixed Media Space, North Adams, MA (2025); Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, ME (2025); Below Grand, New York (2025); Canada, New York (2025); and Hesse Flatow, Amagansett, NY (2025), among others.