On Other Terms — Subtitled NYC

On Other Terms

02.19 – 03.22.202

Pap Souleye Fall and Char Jeré

Curated by Ho Won Kim

To be legible is to be available for capture. The technologies that read one have become inseparable from the technologies that control one: what can be decoded can be seized. Yet illegibility offers no simple refuge—to be unreadable is to risk erasure, a withdrawal from visibility that can amount to social death. The question, then, is not whether to be perceived but how: how to communicate without being received entirely on another’s terms, how to remain present in forms that resist easy resolution. This is the work of fugitivity—not escape but refusal, presence practiced on other terms.

On Other Terms brings together two artists who inhabit the very technologies designed to govern presence, repurposing them from within. Both work with systems built to shield and contain; both turn these systems against their original logics, constructing spaces where capture falters. Their materials are salvaged—metal debris, cardboard, recycled fabric, repurposed electronics—matter bearing traces of prior use. Structures made from such materials refuse the permanence that institutions require. They can be assembled, reconfigured, dissolved.

Pap Souleye Fall works in rupture—the deliberate fracturing of boundaries between disciplines, spaces, the seen and its conditions of visibility. But rupture here is generative: not wound but passage. Fall’s signature is chroma key green, the color engineered for disappearance, designed to be replaced in post-production by whatever image serves the frame. Fall refuses the substitution, letting the green remain—visible, material, architectural. The color holds the trace of its intended function, vibrating between presence and the erasure it was built to enable. In PIXELATEDBUSHOFGHOSTS (2026), scaffolding and inflatables remade in chroma key green extend from floor to ceiling, hovering between parasitic and symbiotic. These structures draw from the host architecture while imposing their own formal logic, blocking conventional passage and sightlines. Viewers must crouch and crawl to move through. But obstruction is also reorganization—the same structure that impedes opens alternate circuits of movement, other ways through.

Char Jeré works through Afro-fractalism: a logic of feedback, recursion, and return drawn from African diasporic histories. The fractal is structure, not ornament—a form where repetition produces difference, where futures fold into presents and pasts without collapsing into linear sequence. Against the straight-line temporality of colonial and capitalist modernity, the fractal figures time as spiral: circling, refusing resolution. This logic becomes spatial and sonic in In the AM Garden Where Everything is PM (2026). Detuned radio systems, Faraday cages, metal detectors, and suspended debris form a listening architecture where transmission and containment exist in unresolved tension. Foxhole radios transform refuse into instruments of deception rather than reception. The Faraday cages, typically deployed to shield military and corporate communications from interception, become collective shelters—architectures of opacity where surveillance cannot reach. But shelter is also enclosure—the same opacity that shields from surveillance turns the outside world into static, severing the very connections it protects.

Neither artist responds to the expanding apparatus of capture with technological rejection. They work through interference, opacity, transmission on frequencies the system cannot parse. No fantasy of total escape is on offer. What the work provides is more durable: partial opacities, provisional architectures, strategic illegibility. Not freedom from systems but freedom practiced within their fractures—fugitivity as method rather than destination.

- Ho Won Kim

Artist Bio

Pap Souleye Fall draws on internet subcultures and online fandoms—specifically the Black Otaku community—to develop an ever-expanding cosmology of images and objects. Spanning video, performance, comic book art, cosplay, and installation, Fall conceives of their multidisciplinary output as akin to fan art: DIY artifacts for the imaginary narratives that undergird their practice. Modalities of speculative fiction, gameplay, and comics serve as potent creative engines, providing strategies by which members of the African diaspora might navigate and transcend systems of global oppression. Central to Fall’s recent work is DEAD PIXEL, a growing constellation of ideas encompassing brightly colored reliefs, quasi-architectural environments, and chroma key green bodysuits adorned with cowrie and peanut shells. Through the repeated invocation of the green screen, Fall explores dynamics of visibility and invisibility, opacity and fugitivity as they merge with the physical and virtual spaces of the present.

Working in a range of disciplines, spanning sound, installation, sculpture, painting, video, and film, Char Jeré has an artistic vision rooted in a philosophy they have coined Afro-fractalism, a term that builds on the foundations of Afrofuturism. Within this framework, time is conceived as nonlinear and multidimensional, a conduit that connects the past, present, and future through intergenerational communication with ancestors. Jeré’s work investigates fractures and connections within a Black diasporic history along with the possibilities for reclaiming and reshaping narratives around race and technology.

*Poster by Jinu Hong
All photos courtesy of Subtitled NYC, New York