Jenkin van Zyl

Jenkin van Zyl is a London-based artist and filmmaker whose multidisciplinary practice spans film, performance, writing and sculpture. Using the power of fantasy to interrogate possible futures, both utopian and dystopian, van Zyl constructs hallucinatory, immersive environments, populated by denizens drawn from his own community of real-life friends and collaborators. In van Zyl’s tactile and intricate world-making, the anxieties and possibilities of contemporary life play out in a myriad of transient spaces: the hotel, the airport, the desert, the casino, the office, the stage, the set. These are spaces of potentiality, if rarely comfortable ones; within them, mess and decay are deployed as instruments, disrupting and responding to the disordered state of global cultural politics. 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.