Tuesday, February 24, 2026 at 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM
The Pit, Los Angeles
Stephen Thomas Gallagher is best known as co-founder of artist duo, Block9; for his multidisciplinary installations at the annual Glastonbury Festival, UK; and his role as live show creative director for bands including Gorillaz and Blur. Sunset: The Jubilation of The Baboons marks the beginning of an ambitious new phase of solo work by the artist. Its presentation at The Pit is Gallagher’s international solo debut and the first time he has shown in the United States.The screening coincides with the launch of House of Kong in Downtown LA - an immersive exhibition celebrating 25 years of Grammy-winning British band Gorillaz - developed and directed by Gallagher in collaboration with Jamie Hewlett and Damon Albarn. The band are also playing two one-off shows at the Hollywood Palladium to launch their new album, The Mountain.Presented as part of The Pit’s Frieze Week 2026 program, Sunset: The Jubilation of The Baboons features aerial footage of LA’s immense shipping port captured by Gallagher whilst in California in 2023. In the film, viewers drift through organic, almost biological color fields which morph and shift to an undulating and layered soundscape. The imagery and sounds slowly become more rhythmic, revealing ordered patterns. An expanse of water warps into a vast container ship being loaded and readied for departure as the sun begins to set. At once awesome and uncanny, these scenes, devoid of people, are instead filled with heavy industry and machinery, dreamily juxtaposed against images of the setting sun, crashing waves and screeching baboons.The piece captures the sensation of waning consciousness or ‘hypnogogia’ that we experience as the mind drifts towards sleep. From eigenlicht – the brain grey we see when we close our eyes – moving images and abstract shapes begin to appear. The picture becomes clearer as images from the day begin to form; familiar motifs acquire different meanings, and objects merge and melt into one another, no longer limited by the rules of reality and physics. Sound takes on a strange quality, drifting through the hinterland between wakefulness and sleep, until, finally, we reach the dream world.Sunset: The Jubilation of The Baboons is the first in a 12-part series of work entitled The Hours, due to premiere in early 2027. The full series will be presented as a multi-roomed, multi-media, immersive installation which takes audiences deep into the shadowy dreamworld suggested in the film.The series takes inspiration, in part, from The Amduat, an ancient Egyptian funerary text which follows the Sun God’s 12-hour journey through the night, from dusk till dawn. The Hours explores the Jungian idea of a collective unconscious, through the context of a contemporary, nebulous netherworld of globalization, neoliberalism, and consumer capitalism.Sunset: The Jubilation of The Baboons features music composed by Tom Demac and Philip Kay and combines live instrumentation with experimental sound design.