Jenkin van Zyl

Images

Surrender, installation view, FACT Liverpool, Liverpool, UK, 2023

Biography

Jenkin van Zyl is an artist and filmmaker based in London with a multidisciplinary practice comprising film, performance, writing and sculpture. Van Zyl’s work combines these disciplines in hallucinatory, immersive installations, typically centred around film, which give birth to fantastical communities inhabiting transient spaces: ghouls breeding cakes in aircrafts, inflatable beasts in a desert fortress, or rats writhing in love hotels. Beyond the screen, the protagonists and their worlds have a material legacy as “escapees”, in the form of sculptures and objects that pervade van Zyl’s oeuvre.

Jenkin van Zyl (b. 1993) graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2021 and was the recipient of the RA Gold Medal Prize. A solo show, Lost Property, will open at ARoS in Aarhus, Denmark in 2025. Recent exhibitions include Yay, to have a mouth! Rose Easton and Ginny on Frederick, London, UK (2025); Transmediale, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2024); Dance of the Sleepwalkers, Edel Assanti, London, UK (2024); Surrender, FACT Liverpool, UK (2023); Surrender, Edel Assanti, London, UK (2023); The Horror Show!, Somerset House, London, UK (2022); Barbe à Papa, CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France (2022); Machines of Love, Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland (2021); Hors Pistes, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2020); Kiss My Genders, Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2019), and Oblivion Industry, The Horse Hospital, London, UK (2019).

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Works

One-half-of-GRACE Cryosuit, 2023
Surrender, 2023
SURRENDER! Sleepwalkers Enduring: Prisoners of Paradise, Prisoners of Love, 2023
no happier place than a loser’s, 2023
P.E.E.P. buzzer ii, 2023
Machines of Love, 2021
Everybody Loves a Winner, 2019
Looners, 2019
Loon, 2019