Jenkin van Zyl: Lost Property

The opening exhibition in the subterranean gallery, The Salling Gallery, is presented by Jenkin van Zyl (b. 1993), a British artist and filmmaker already well on his way to establishing himself as one of the most interesting and compelling voices on the international art scene, and whose work you can experience on Danish soil for the very first time.

Through his immersive film installations, van Zyl constructs fantastical communities inhabiting transient spaces: stunt cowboys in a foley sound studio, doppelgängers in a sweat exchange, and rats competing in dance marathons. Drawing from sites of fringe subcultures where alternative ways of living are mapped out, his work examines both the vital world-building that occurs within these spaces and how microcosms of broader societal politics can emerge within worlds built to escape them.

With a distinctive irreverence, van Zyl challenges our understanding of identity, belonging, and power structures by discarding traditional binaries in favour of multiplicity and instability. His collaborative process creates narratives that reflect contemporary anxieties while suggesting that transformation might come through embracing rather than resisting our own unraveling.

“Jenkin van Zyl is a visionary contemporary artist, and as such the perfect choice to inaugurate ARoS' new subterranean gallery. I look forward to our guests being immersed in his fascinating universe where the boundaries between reality and fantasy become blurred. It will no doubt be both liberating and mesmerising,” says Museum Director Rebecca Matthews.

An anarchist dream where reality is distorted
Especially for ARoS' new gallery, van Zyl has created the work Lost Property, an ambitious video work presented within a total installation that transforms the exhibition gallery into The Lost Property Bureau: a mysterious bureaucratic facility where protagonists return seeking their lost doppelgangers. The film’s endlessly looping narrative follows three characters through destabilising administrative procedures as they undergo transformative encounters with their doubles. The work, created in collaboration with van Zyl's close community of queer performers, dancers and musicians, suggests that in our increasingly insecure present, transformation might come through embracing rather than resisting our own unraveling.

As you enter the raw exhibition space, you are immersed in a scenography of gauze backdrops that simulate a film set of an abandoned London street. Mirroring the film’s looping narrative structures, the installation cyclically guides you along a pathway that spirals into a lavender-hued screening room at the centre of the gallery. Around the gallery, spinning weathervanes of the film's characters rotate endlessly, searching for direction.

“Lost Property speaks to our time, where reality often feels like a fever dream. We live in a world where major crises are filtered through layers of simulation and spectacle. With its dark humour, the work attempts to reflect on how we can rethink ourselves and our systems in the chaotic time that is our present. Lost Property shows how identity splits and transforms and how we navigate a world of contradictions,” says Jenkin van Zyl.