Jenkin van Zyl at FACT Liverpool
Surrender, Liverpool, UK
Jenkin van Zyl’s work invites us to consider the common anxieties of our society, and how they may be influencing the culture of our present and future. Exploring ideas of productivity, escapism and community, Surrender (2023) brings us into Jenkin’s hallucinatory film-world, centred around a gruelling endurance dance marathon and the cryptid lore of the ‘rat king’. Spilling across the ground floor galleries, Jenkin transforms these spaces into immersive environments, from a dancefloor inside the belly of a rat, to an energy drink-lined trophy room.
Inside the ballroom, an endlessly looping film follows the experience of GRACE, a visitor to the Paradise Engineering Endurance Partnership (P.E.E.P.) Hotel. Inspired by the transient nature of Japanese love hotels - short-stay fantastical spaces that can be booked by the hour for “rest” - GRACE checks in and begins to compete, along with other paired couples, in a series of increasingly strange tournaments that play with the limitations and expansiveness of the body. Fuelled by an endless stream of ‘Limitless’ branded energy drinks, it’s unclear whether GRACE’s drive to participate emerges from an insatiable yearning, or from a desire for community, oblivion, or victory in the marathon.
‘The marathon was a place for dreaming. And if reality was failing us, we could count on each other (if no-one else) to dream big.’
Through these works, Jenkin questions ideas of individuality and collectivity: community-building fosters belonging, allyship and resistance, but often neoliberal frameworks pit us against each other for basic survival. Surrender evokes a sense of menace and anxiety that reflects the needs and fears of our current moment - our need for productivity and success competes with our desire for community, at the cost of exhaustion and, ultimately, surrender.
Jenkin van Zyl, Surrender, installation view, FACT Liverpool, UK, 2023. © Jenkin van Zyl. Courtesy the artist and Edel Assanti. Photo by Rob Battersby.
