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. Recent exhibitions include Transmediale, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (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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