Small Hours

Small Hours August 4 - September 2, 2026

Canary Test is pleased to announce Small Hours, a screening series emphasizing the sonic qualities of five significant videos by Torbjørn Rødland, P. Staff, Farah Al Qasimi, Kang Seung Lee and Cyprien Gaillard.

On Tuesday and Wednesday evenings from August 4 through September 2, join us for special screenings that recruit the Canary Test soundsystem to explore the audio design of works where the soundtracks play prominent and distinctive roles.

Featuring 

August 4 & 5, 6-9pm Torbjørn Rødland  132 BPM, 2005 Single channel video, color, sound 13 min 22 sec, looped Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery

August 11 & 12, 6-9pm P. Staff Skeleton, 2025 HD video, color, sound 16 min 36 sec, looped Courtesy of the artist

August 18 & 19, 6-9pm Farah Al Qasimi Time of Misfortune, 2026 Single channel video, color, sound 18 min 02 sec, looped Commissioned by the National Pavilion, United Arab Emirates, Venice Biennale 2026 Courtesy of the artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles

August 25 & 26, 6-9pm Kang Seung Lee The Heart of a Hand, 2022 Single channel 4K video, color, sound 13 min 13 sec, looped In collaboration with Joshua Serafin and Nathan Mercury Kim Courtesy of the artist, Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles; Gallery Hyundai, Seoul; and Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

September 1 & 2, 6-9pm Cyprien Gaillard Ocean II Ocean_,_ 2019 HD video, color, sound 10 min 56 sec Courtesy of the artist, Sprüth Magers, and Gladstone Gallery

About the artists

Torbjørn Rødland (b. 1970) makes photographic images that pointedly address their viewers, evoking a wide range of emotional and intellectual states. Curiosity, humor, criticality, artifice, reverence for the natural world, and romanticism appear throughout his work and often in the same image. Rødland also emphasizes the formal attributes of his photographs, pushing the medium toward modes of visual expression more commonly associated with painting, and forging links between twentieth-century art photography and twenty-first-century approaches to image-making common to advertising and social media. Often prompted by non-photographic imagery that he transforms into real-world photographic subjects, Rødland portrays scenes designed to generate psychological reaction through his depiction of highly sensory qualities.

P. Staff (b. 1987) is an artist based in Los Angeles and London. Across video installation, sculpture, and poetry, their work probes the structures of power that produce and define the living and the dead. 

Farah Al Qasimi (b. 1991) has built a practice that captures the dizzying relationship between material culture, globalized media, and contemporary society. A photographer, performer, musician, and video artist, Al Qasimi presents her work in vibrant and layered installations that speak to the collision of images in real and online spaces. Examining structures of power, gender, (post)coloniality, and consumer aesthetics in an interconnected world, her work often conveys an uncanny geography, both specific and placeless.

Kang Seung Lee (b. 1978) is a multidisciplinary artist born in South Korea who lives and works in Los Angeles. His work frequently engages the legacy of transnational queer histories, particularly as they intersect with art history. 

Cyprien Gaillard (b. 1980) works across a range of media including film, video, photography, collage, installation and live performance.  His extraordinary cosmos gives new form to such phenomena as civilizational upheaval and geological time. Concerned with the wreckage of modernity and the intersections between human artefacts, urban geography and psychology, the Paris and Berlin-based artist’s work embraces a poetry of entropy that rearranges history to shed new light on the present.

Acknowledgements

Canary Test would like to thank Cyprien Gaillard, Farah Al Qasimi, Kang Seung Lee, P. Staff, and Torbjørn Rødland for their participation in this exhibition program. Thank you as well to Reyna Colt-Lacayo and John Lee of David Kordansky Gallery, Claire de Dobay Rifelj of Sprüth Magers, and Mariel Williams and Mark Hayward of François Ghebaly for their kind support of the exhibition. Thank you to Phil Peters and Bennett Shaeffer for technical assistance.