“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Marking his first major solo exhibition in his hometown and coinciding with the tenth anniversary of his prolific artistic career, Lightness of Being is a transversal retrospective of Mallick Welli’s work, presented at Galerie Atiss in Dakar.

Welli revisits his usual esoteric themes—duality, spirituality, history, material culture, and restitution—not of objects, but of memory, pedagogy, and lost identity.

His work explores the convergence of religious and material influences, economics and power dynamics, and how these forces evolve to shape visual culture. There is a clear quest for ecology and interdependence—how seemingly unrelated events coincide and affect each other.

In Anonym(us), Welli employs both the performative and the stylistic to address the relationship between humanity, objects, and trees. Trees hold deep significance: they precede us, and in Senegal, they are objects of spiritual reverence and carry a sacred presence.