The inaugural exhibition at ARoS’s Salling Gallery, Denmark, sees the artist dissolve identity into an endless performance.
Have you ever found yourself trapped in a fever dream, unable to escape the same Kafkaesque loop, endlessly repeating the same gestures in the hope of a different outcome? That’s what it felt like to experience Lost Property, a major new video installation by London-based artist Jenkin van Zyl, and the inaugural exhibition at ARoS’s subterranean Salling Gallery.
Before seeing the film, you’re already thrown into its uncanny world. The installation opens up like a crime scene dressed by a props department: towers of variously sized cardboard boxes stamped with red question marks and ‘fragile’ tape; an encompassing backdrop of a deserted London, poised for the next episode of a long-cancelled soap; true to scale dolls of the film’s protagonists stood atop a wheel of office binders, frozen in an elegant pas de deux. These constantly spinning weathervanes give the same queasy energy as the animatronic figures of theme park dioramas.
At the centre of the installation, encased within thick lavender curtains, is a video that refuses to play straight. As the three figures arrive at the shadowy, covert-looking administrative facility, masked workers go vigorously about their work, though it is never clear what they are actually doing. The protagonists move through these sequences with a kind of aimless determination – equal parts lost and complicit, like avatars caught in a broken simulation. There’s a palpable sense of confusion and longing in their actions, but also a strange, ritualistic acceptance of the absurd tasks they’re made to perform. At times they even appear to find pleasure in the spectacle; by performing seductive movements in lingerie, they luxuriate in the monstrous roles assigned to them.
These cycles are familiar terrain for van Zyl, explored earlier works such as Machines of Love (2020/21) – which lures us beneath a decaying Viking film set into a casino of buried aircrafts, where a sextet of ghouls spiral into an erotic game of destruction and renewal – or Surrender (2023) – where anthropomorphic rats compete in disorienting dance marathon tournaments at a hotel which morphs into cell, nightclub, courtroom and beating heart. Both construct spaces that feel like feverish hybrids of spectacle and confinement, their protagonists locked in an endless pursuit of pleasure, endurance and transformation, yet never quite reaching an end point. What feels different here is the overt entanglement with bureaucracy, the surreal internalization of its logic, or lack thereof, and the dissolution of identity under the weight of endless process.
The film’s refusal to resolve itself becomes both its central frustration and its main achievement. We’re left in that familiar psychic stasis of waiting for something that never comes. In this way, van Zyl’s work doesn’t just depict disorientation, it induces it. In the end, ‘Lost Property’ offers no escape route. If there’s a warning here it’s buried beneath the spectacle: that in an age of constant reinvention, the real risk is not losing yourself but being asked to perform the same role, forever.
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