Jenkin van Zyl

Jenkin van Zyl is a multi-disciplinary artist based in London who makes hallucinatory, narrative installations, typically centred on film. With initial projects ignited by guerilla filmmaking on the ruins of Hollywood movie sets, van Zyl's projects orbit around fantastical countercultural communities: ghouls breeding cakes in aircrafts, latex inflatables hazed in a desert fortress, and rats competing in dance marathons.

Conjured with a queer irreverence, one that is attentive to the power and politics of fantasy, his films perform carnivalesque explorations of abandoned yet grandiose neoliberal landscapes. Through this world-making van Zyl initiate an underworld revolt of transient spaces: the hotel, the airport, the desert, the casino, the stage, the set. Binaries of front and back-stage, self and other, desire and revulsion are displaced by instability, entropy and multiplicity, and here characters cycle through patterns of creative and destructive phenomena, in attempts to move away from the tyranny of individual identity towards a communal celebration of collapse.

Beyond the screen these worlds have a material legacy as sculptural escapees, and are often shown within cinemas built from reconfigured materials such as pneumatic tube systems, infinity mirrors and fuselage. 

Jenkin van Zyl received a postgraduate diploma from the Royal Academy, London in 2021 and was the recipient of the Gold Medal Prize. His work has been profiled in Frieze, ArtForum, The Guardian, Spike art, Vogue, The White Review, i-D magazine, Art Monthly and was recently named as one of London's best young artists by Time Out.