Jenkin van Zyl

Lost Property follows three characters returning to the Bureau of Lost Property—a labyrinthine sorting facility where each searches for a missing doppelganger. The Bureau’s flamboyant personnel enforce elaborate administrative rituals, guiding the protagonists toward destabilising confrontations with their other halves. Only one half of each pair can exit, locking them in an endless rotation between original and double.

Looners (2019) is a kaleidoscopic fantasy filmed in the immense ruins of Hollywood film sets in the Atlas Mountains. Leading us across a series of fantastical worlds performers, anonymised by silicone masks, enact scenes of ritualised pleasure and violence in a manner simultaneously ludicrous and grotesque. This unruly species, somewhere between human and monster, are compelled towards abject repetitions by obscure libidinal drives, ‘a kind of love-as-violence, and violence-as-love’, repeatedly hazing their captive latex inflatables. Rejecting all binary classification–––of real and virtual, front and back stage, male and female, self and other, rationality and madness, surface and subtext, style and content, time and space––– the film instead embraces multiple selves, instability and deviance. Commissioned by Hayward gallery for ‘Kiss my Genders’ (2019)

‘Escape From Fort Bravo’ (2016) was birthed from furtive filming at the remains of the titular spaghetti-western film studio in the Spanish desert; a labyrinth kept under surveillance by a group of ex-stunt men and their guard dogs- us a coup of homos trespassing on the range.

Surrender follows a visitor to the P.E.E.P. hotel, GRACE, as they compete with four other couples at the hotel’s ballroom in increasingly bewildering tournaments that play with the limitations and expansiveness of the body. The film traces phenomenons of 20th century dance marathons––gruelling endurance competitions wherein couples competed for hundreds of hours in almost-non-stop dancing––with the cryptid lore of the rat king and Japanese love hotels. Here the dance floor variously becomes a cell, a nightclub, the belly of a whale, a courtroom, a treadmill and a beating heart–a space for negotiating community, desire and risk, but also to seek out victory, exhaustion and The End.

Machines of Love (2020/1) is a hallucinogenic horror which lures us beneath a decaying Viking film set into a casino of buried aircrafts, continuing Jenkin van Zyl’s process of guerrilla filmmaking in abandoned Hollywood film sets. A sextet of ghouls arrive here on the promise of a Good Fantasy, setting in motion an erotic game of destruction and renewal. Caught in the Machines’ lottery of role-play, they breed cakes of their own likeness into the fuselage: a rush of passion that ends, inevitably, in a grisly conclusion. Attentive to the mutability and rotation of roles, the film free-falls through the terror, excitement, panic, and anticipation held within self-creation in a rumination on the enduring power and politics of fantasy.

In Vitro (all the love mix) is a remix of bonus footage shot at the frozen landscapes from In Vitro (2020, 40 minutes), the film at the centre of a labyrinth within Jenkin van Zyl's installation being developed for Gi2021.