24 October 2023 American dance marathons, queer dance floors and Japanese love hotels: Surrender invites visitors into the ‘hellmouth’ of a giant inflatable rat.
Surrender, the latest film by artist and filmmaker Jenkin van Zyl, is quite literally an endurance test, for both his actors and audience. 1930s-era dance marathons, where destitute people aggressively cut a rug for cash during the Great Depression, make up just one pillar of inspiration for the multidisciplinary artist’s most recent project. Van Zyl’s chaotic, queer, fetishistic art pieces have marked him as one of London’s most promising new artists, and Surrender is no different, transposing van Zyl’s outré aesthetic to his largest arena yet – at FACT Liverpool.
Jenkin van Zyl, Surrender, installation view, FACT Liverpool, liverpool, UK, 2023. Photography Rob Battersby.
You watch Surrender in the womb-like belly of a gigantic inflatable rat, walking down its throat to a cluster of red velvet chairs laid out like a Parisian restaurant. The film is cacophonous, unnerving and utterly compelling. It’s van Zyl’s most linear film yet, following a group of strange rat-human hybrids as they find themselves spiralling orgasmically through a series of bizarre competitions. Van Zyl has constructed Surrender around the idea of the ‘rat king’, the gross phenomenon where a mischief of rats coalesce and their tails become inextricably entangled, forming one being.
Surrender is the type of sensory experience so overpowering on all fronts that you don’t remember ever going in until you’re spat out the rear end of the rat and faced with the light of day. It blends van Zyl’s personal references with his flair for the theatrical and carnivalesque, making it the most maximalist project yet for an already pretty maximalist artist.
In time for Surrender’s opening at FACT, where it runs until late January, van Zyl speaks to Dazed in his cavernous studio at Somerset House. It’s like stepping into his mind, where ghoulish masks stare out from shelves, a railing is loaded with voluminous Barbie-pink garments, and a silicone muscle suit lies limply on a table like a body awaiting operation. Even on a random Wednesday afternoon van Zyl is characteristically made up, clad in a long, black doublet with a matching skirt and leather pillbox hat.
Patrick Sproull: You premiered Surrender at Edel Assanti earlier this year but you’ve brought it back in an expanded form at FACT. What led to the expansion?
Jenkin van Zyl: The film takes place over seven days in a hotel. The key references in the film are American dance marathons, Japanese love hotels and the central symbol of the rat king. The original installation took place in a series of corridors and domestic spaces, and you watched the film from a hotel bed. But here we’re taking more of a reference from this domed ballroom that’s become the beating heart of the film.
These American dance marathons were long-form pageants of fatigue in the 20s and 30s. They started in the roaring 20s as an endurance spectacle. There was a lot of interest in the performing of Guinness World Record-style endurance feats. People would do things like pole-standing or hand-holding; these almost frivolous and ridiculous displays of endurance. As the economic crisis of the 30s rolled in, they became more spectacles of suffering. There would be this dangling of a carrot that couples in desperation would hold out for because they could get fed and sleep. I was interested in how that reflected our contemporary state of attention economy and how on apps like TikTok you can find yourself in a cycle of watching suffering and spectacle.
I was researching and thinking about the queer dance floor as a space of both world-making, community-building and discovery, but also as a place of endurance and as a distorted mirror of the politics of the outside world.
Can you talk us through the new sculptural elements you’ve introduced to the FACT installation?
There’s this grinning rat face that appears as an emblem throughout, so that’s visible in these trophies and in this hellmouth that is the entrance to the hotel. That entrance has been expanded into a new auditorium where you watch the film. Another key part of the installation is this reconfigured pneumatic tube system. They used to be a way of sending capsules through banks or department stores and now they’re used in places like Dean Street for STI checks to send samples around the building. I got the last full tube system that was left in the UK and it feeds through the inflatable and out into the lobby space where there’ll be a four-metre tall plinth made out of energy drinks. That’s the most nerve-wracking bit to install. We did several all-nighters of rigging the tube system before and I can’t be arsed doing it again but, well, here we are.
Your previous films – Machines of Love and Looners – were examples of guerilla filmmaking, whereas Surrender is more professionally assembled. What was the change in scale and style like?
I learned through guerilla filmmaking. The first film I made was my degree show at Slade called Escape from Fort Bravo [shot at semi-abandoned spaghetti Western sets in southern Spain]. I wanted to access this idea of the epic but with limited resources. I wanted to use that method of breaking and entering to deconstruct queer narratives of violence in Hollywood filmmaking. That continued into Looners, which is a film about these latex inflatable characters that are hazed in a complex of film studios.
The thing with guerilla filmmaking is that it’s so adrenaline-driven and chaotic that, majoritively, the resulting footage became just snippets of chaos. I liked that episodic collage style of filmmaking, but I wanted this film to construct more of a narrative arc. I think that journey to a more conventional way of filmmaking has still allowed me to keep some of the improvisation but apply it to a more structured framework. Although we only had a limited amount of days to shoot Surrender so it was still carnage.
You’ve talked about the thematic underpinnings of Surrender before and how the film represents a microcosm for queer spaces where competition is induced despite there not being any. I’m interested in how much of your personal politics influences your art.
We live in a culture that is progressing in layers of chaos, with technological advancements at a level we cannot keep up with. To me, it feels like we’re in a perpetual state of confusion. It’s a really troubling space to be making work in because it feels like the landscape you’re operating in is constantly shifting. There’s this new book, Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, that covers this quite well, about this strange mirror-verse we live in where everything feels like a trick or a conspiracy. What I’m trying to unpack is how to centre unruly or divergent experiences and bodies in a way that understands that they are always in conflict with constructions of power that try to capitalise off that divergence.
Because I’m making works with performers that exist within the queer community, it’s always about centering and flourishing that idea of collapse and chaos and divergence. I find that when the world is in such a state of collapse, to celebrate the idea of decay, whether that’s through the ruins of film sets I’ve filmed on or through this idea of endurance. I always have these symbols of entropy and I find that a reassuring space to flourish within.
After Surrender, what’s next?
The initial trepidatious steps into making a new project always feel like a leap into a rabbit warren. I’m just trying to dig multiple holes of research and hope they coalesce. In the past, that meant strange serendipity between different research, like how the pneumatic tube system I got ended up mirroring the tube system present in the love hotels I was researching. But at this point it’s about approaching the research with abundance and right now I’m collecting, I’m assembling, I’m writing.
The next project is, I think, going to be four films set in a Victorian sanatorium spa environment and they’ll all have a figure-of-eight narrative, where they’re four shorts that weave into each other. There’ll be an idea of doppelgangers and doubles because the patients in the spa undergo treatments of deconstruction. There’s going to be fire stunts. I’m doing all the costuming for that right now and hopefully start filming in the spring.
