Pap Souleye Fall and Char Jeré
In 2022, the Korean artist Jaejoon Jang opened a space in Greenpoint that skews more vest-pocket kunsthalle than sales-driven gallery. (Jang supports the project with his offsite work as a tattooist.) The program’s eclectic: unfinished paintings, Palestinian liberation, international comics. This exhibition, from the inspired curatorial mind of MoMA fellow Ho Won Kim, unites the sublimely compatible, yet bracingly distinct, visions of Pap Souleye Fall and Char Jeré, two early-career rising stars on the New York scene. Fall grew up in Senegal and Jeré’s family fled Mississippi during the Great Migration; their intricate installations each take legacies of the African diaspora as their foundation. The artists also share an interest in tech, both low-fi and high, and favor salvaged materials. A drastically abbreviated list of the latter includes obsolete electronics and functioning DIY radios in Jeré’s polymathic sonic maelstrom. A lenticular Dragonball-Z card and a life-size inflatable Santa have cameos in Fall’s Chroma-key green, room-filling matrix. Each artist excels at creating environments that seem to be coming together as they’re falling apart, implying refuge but ultimately denying access. (Edouard Glissant’s “right to opacity” might come to mind.) The overall experience is a thrill, as if you’ve stumbled by chance into a secret rehearsal of separate rituals, previously unknown to each other and now ecstatically overlapping. —Andrea K. Scott