Jenkin van Zyl’s films draw on fantasy realms – from queer nightclubs to cosplay conventions – to engage with contemporary reality. In Looners, 2019, a menacing troupe of masked characters trespasses on dilapidated filmsets in the Atlas Mountains, eventually summoning and decapitating a deity figure dressed in a penguin-like inflatable suit. And in Surrender, 2023, humanoid rats spend a week trapped in a Big Brotherstyle hotel where they are subjected to a series of challenges inspired by depression-era dance marathons. ‘We congregated,’ announces one intertitle, ‘because we all wanted the same thing: escape.’ The London-based artist’s work, equal parts bacchanal and prison drama, parodies our society in which ostensible freedom at the level of self-expression is intertwined with extensive surveillance and control.
Currently on show at ARoS in Aarhus, Denmark, Lost Property, 2025, is a 47-minute looped film that follows three characters with human bodies and grotesque reptilian faces as they look for their missing doppelgängers in a chaotic ‘bureau of lost property’. Over the course of the film, each figure enters an underground concrete arena for a fraught encounter with their double. One pair, with angular faces and pointy ears, have a dance-off under flashing lights, then suddenly their heads are conjoined by a tube of fabric that they struggle to pull off. Another duo, with sharp teeth and tentacles for hair, meet at either side of a conveyor belt. After a few minutes, the doppelgänger turns into a hyper-realistic cake and is devoured by their opposite number, who flings gloopy pink innards across the space before washing off in a bubble bath.
These characters are defined by their vanity (they assume athletic poses, dance for cameras, gaze at clips of themselves online) and solipsism (their fixation on the doubles leaves little room for interactions with each other). The third protagonist, who has a wrinkly, down-turned face and a brown bob wig, auditions for a film in front of their double, who broadcasts the performance on nearby screens using a smartphone. Meanwhile, the sharp-toothed figure finds photos of their double in a fashion magazine and then struts out of the office with arms full of luxury shopping bags. Alongside constant references to showbiz, fashion and social media, the obsession with doppelgängers comes to represent an over-investment in the self as image and by extension the alienating effects of our narcissistic culture.
All the while a team of lost property centre employees wearing red-light therapy masks attends to various pseudo-bureaucratic activities – imagine an episode of The Office scripted by Joseph Beuys. They sort through piles of old toothbrushes, photocopy mannequin limbs and iron crinkled papers. Hardly five seconds go by without a bizarre but meticulously orchestrated detail: an obscure symbol, a brief stop-motion segment, a sudden cut to a different setting or a burst of incongruous music. At one point the narrative is put on hold while the cast dance to Chris Isaak’s 1989 ballad, ‘Wicked Game’.
Much has been made of the maximalist intensity of van Zyl’s art, but his intelligence as a filmmaker is often overlooked. Central to Lost Property, for instance, is the interaction between linear content and cyclical format. At first the film seems to follow a forward trajectory: characters search and find, roam and transform, employees mark tallies and burn candles, sand falls through an hourglass. But when the seamless loop begins after 47 minutes, sets are inexplicably restored, protagonists repeat themselves, and lost items remain lost. The content, charged with a sense of struggle and significance, is ironised by its containing structure. Dramatic moments, like a tray crashing to the floor, become less plot developments than beats in a predictable rhythm. The onslaught of detail in van Zyl’s films operates primarily at a visceral level, but its effects are nevertheless thoughtfully constructed. In this case, the tension between internal elements and the looping whole generates a feeling of futile urgency. The characters are trapped in a spiral where there is anxiety but no meaningful action, performance but no communication, where self-expression and bureaucratic tedium appear intertwined.
At ARoS, Lost Property is screened inside a replica of the bureau, littered with cardboard boxes and enclosed by a floor-to-ceiling printout of the desolate city streets that feature in the film. Three sculptures populate the space: pairs of doppelgängers dance on poles, each with a circular shelf of box files for a pedestal and three rotating arms. Van Zyl’s previous installations have more convincingly lived up to the imaginative force of his films. Surrender, for example, was shown at Edel Assanti in a hotel room accessible through the mouth of a huge inflatable rat (Reviews AM464). Here, though, the installation is sparse and the projection curtained off to create a relatively conventional screening area at the centre of the exhibition. Substantial motifs in the film – cyclical time, double identities, crazed bureaucracy – are travestied by their appearance in the sculptures as flimsy symbols (like pairs of mannequins and mechanical spinning limbs). This is a common problem for filmmakers working in the art industry, under pressure to create sellable objects and immersive experiences.
Regardless, the new film solidifies van Zyl’s reputation as one of the foremost artists of his generation. It has recently become fashionable to pitch raw experience against social commentary among critics who lament a shift in the past decade from the sensationalist provocations of the yBas and of post-internet art to the box-ticking exercises of neoliberal identity politics. Van Zyl’s practice is exciting at this moment because it boldly reaffirms what has always been true: that art can be both deranged and intelligent, sensual and cerebral – that a major part of its effect is to dissolve these distinctions.
