Jenkin van Zyl at The Fitzrovia Chapel
Middlesex Hospital Blues, London, UK
Curated by the award-winning artists and BAFTA-nominated filmmakers Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Middlesex Hospital Blues centres around Blue, the final film by Derek Jarman, released just four months before his death from AIDs-related complications. An unbroken field of saturated colour accompanied by a spoken text and score, Blue is a profound meditation on illness, perception and mortality. Rather than install Jarman's film, the curators translate its singular gesture into a collective act of remembrance and resistance. The setting is deliberate and poignant: The Fitzrovia Chapel was once part of Middlesex Hospital, home to the country's first dedicated HIV/AIDS wards.
A newly commissioned ambisonic work by composer, Simon Fisher Turner, draws on his archive recordings of Derek Jarman during their long-running friendship and collaboration. The piece was created with Tilda Swinton, another frequent Jarman collaborator. The new composition weaves excerpts from an assortment of Jarman’s texts and projects, including Blue and Bliss. Swinton's voice will move through the chapel via a bespoke speaker array developed with Arup, enveloped in Fisher Turner's score and extending the methodology of the live performances into an immersive, spatial encounter.
Working in dialogue with the sound piece, artist Jenkin Van Zyl presents a new sculptural installation. A two-way mirrored screen spans the full width of the chapel, its 16:9 proportions echoing the shape of the cinema screen that Blue itself once filled. Behind it stand two mirrored sculptures of an embracing couple, holding one another upright, positioned before the altar. These chrome sculptures draw on the dance marathons of 1920s and 30s America, where couples danced for days in exchange for food, shelter and the slim chance of a prize. Partners were assigned rather than chosen, and if one stopped moving, both were eliminated, so holding each other upright was less devotion than survival.
The exhibition title resonates on several levels: Jarman's Blue; the blue uniforms once worn by Middlesex Hospital staff, colloquially known as "hospital blues"; and the naming tradition of the blues as a universal feeling, with no lament as palpable as blues music. Through sound, colour and form, the exhibition becomes an act of bearing witness – to the lost, to the care given, and to what was once deemed unseeable, unspeakable and untouchable. Here, it becomes a communal lament.
Jenkin van Zyl, Everybody Loves a Winner (Chrome Limitless Growth) ii, 2024. 58 x 75 x 150 cm, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Hua International.
