It is hard to forget the work of Jenkin van Zyl (b.1993) or the eye-catching quasi-medieval ensembles he wears in everyday life. For almost a decade he has created films populated by strange figures caught up in rituals in precarious settings. The films present worlds for the viewer to get lost in, which are extended into the space of the gallery through elaborate installations, drawings and sculptures. Featuring references to cinematic genres, from horror to musicals, as well as styles of performance and craft traditions, his work embodies a Dionysian approach to artistic practice that is excessive, provocative and stimulating.
Yet for all its recognisable Baroque excess, Van Zyl’s work provides a strangely tender reflection on what it means to exist in a body in an age of repeated cycles of destruction and layers of simulation. He describes his practice as exploring the tension between the individual and society: ‘the wrestling for bodily autonomy and the systems that interfere with them’. Within this dialectic, Van Zyl often brings together contrasting elements – backstage and onstage, repulsion and desire, structure and decay, legibility and confusion – to foreground a position of precarity and ambiguity as a productive site for discovery. Similarly, the work itself contrasts a high level of finish – carefully rendered sculptures, detailed drawings, films with elaborate set-pieces and cinematography – with old materials, a punk DIY attitude and a renegade mode of film-making. In one of his earliest films, Escape from Fort Bravo, Van Zyl and some friends broke into a semi-abandoned film set in the south of Spain, where they were chased by security dogs and played out scenes in which they changed character each day.
Themes of trespass and transgression – albeit in a more subtle manner – continue in his most recent film and installation Lost Property at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum (21st June 2025–6th April 2026), which is the inaugural exhibition for their new underground gallery. It is the perfect setting for the apocalyptic atmosphere that pervades much of Van Zyl’s work. As visitors enter the space, they are met with a large panoramic view of an empty city street extending across the entire perimeter of the gallery, which serves as a backdrop for three figurative sculptures based on characters in the film. Alongside stacks of cardboard boxes labelled with branded ‘Lost Property Bureau’ tape is a hanging Perspex screen with the phrase ‘Your Loss is Our Motivation’, its glistening letters formed from simple metal pushpins. These interventions provide a subtext for the show and its themes of loss, desire and forms of misrecognition.
Whereas Van Zyl’s previous installations have featured a more elaborate setup and recreation of the universe of his films – for example, the silver inflatable head of a rat that acted as a gateway to Surrender – Lost Property evokes instead the impression of being backstage at a theatre or inside a vacant warehouse, which contrasts with the strange environment depicted in the film. This tension recalls Mark Fisher’s distinction between the ‘weird’ and the ‘eerie’. The weird, he observed, ‘brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the “homely”’, whereas the eerie is concerned with ‘the most fundamental metaphysical questions to do with existence and non-existence: Why is there something here when there should be nothing? Why is there nothing here when there should be something?’ – a sense of an unknowable force or agent at work.
At the centre of the installation is the film, also titled Lost Property, which is shown within a lavender curtained interior; bundles of clothes are used as seating. The film follows three masked characters – a fashion-obsessed razor-toothed minx, a melancholic dancer and a grimacing aspiring actor dressed in drab office wear – as they go on a search for their lost selves. Each character follows the same trajectory: stalking an empty city street, before being drawn towards the Lost Property Bureau, where they linger in a waiting-room-cum-sorting-office inhabited by menacing workers. They then venture into a vast cylindrical concrete space where they meet their double or doppelgänger, only to return to the street and repeat the journey all over again.
Unlike Van Zyl’s previous films, which use on-screen text to convey the narrative, Lost Property foregoes this device, instead allowing the visuals and soundscape to distil the essence of story. Central to this is the looping structure of the film, in which the scenes relating to each of the three characters, who move across three clearly defined settings, intersect and fold into one another. Partly informed by Peter Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers (1988) – a three-character dark comedy that uses sequential numbers to structure its plot – Van Zyl employs a range of motifs to point to the wider themes of his film. One of these is the ways in which capitalism produces easily assimilated forms of identity that can circulate within culture much like commodities, and the constructed nature of that system. Advertising imagery in the street reads ‘Have you forgotten something?’ and ‘Unleash Your Style Define Your Story’; the buildings are revealed to be mere façades supported by scaffolding; and the characters’ masks function as temporary props rather than hybrid extensions of the body, with no attempt to conceal their artifice. Similarly, the film’s score samples fragments of ‘Wicked Game’ by Chris Isaak, and ‘Don’t Make Me Over’ by Dionne Warwick, further suggesting a narrative of play and resistance to the forces that seek to control behaviour.
Through the looping structure of Lost Property, Van Zyl builds anticipation for when each character meets their double, only to defer any momentary catharsis by their perpetual return to the street. For the artist, this wicked game of yearning mirrors contemporary experience: there is such rampant and rapid technological progress, [and yet] it is a more alienating and confusing time in which people are dissolving. Things are mediated constantly through various stimulations and screens and [there is] this notion that the stable sense of progress has collapsed.
However, for Van Zyl the work is not completely nihilistic. He compares its self-reflective nature to the ouroboros, an ancient symbol of a serpent eating its tail often interpreted as a metaphor for the cycle of life, death and rebirth. This autocannibalistic concept is made most explicit when the minx-like character – played to perfection by Van Zyl’s frequent collaborator, the artist Alex Margo Arden (b.1994) – goes on to cut the finger off their double and eventually consume the whole body. Collapsing the distinction between predator and prey, the scene represents the carnivorous nature of desire. For Van Zyl, the characters’ attempts to consume themselves – either literally or through some form of battle – was an exploration of ‘the challenge to maintain a stable or fixed identity but then also of the systems of bureaucracy that demand performance or demand a fixed or sovereign self’. Yet within this Van Zyl sees a potential for ‘transformation or union with the other self’.
An interest in the instability of selfhood pervades much of Van Zyl’s work, often articulated through the doubling of characters and the use of masks. The doppelgänger is a supernatural being, typically associated with death, but also connects to double selves of the online world. In Doppelganger (2023) Naomi Klein explored how this ‘mirror world’ has become a dark inverse of established modes of behaviour and belief systems, distorting the sociopolitical landscape. For Van Zyl, such mirroring speaks to the ways in which the individual can become lost within a collective. He is interested in how various subcultural spaces – whether queer nightlife, historical reenactment groups or online fetish communities – offer forms of escape from normative structures, yet at times perpetuate many of the prejudices they attempt to resist. As Terre Thaemlitz observed when reflecting on the notion of nightlife as a utopia: ‘suffering is in here with us’.6 There is, once again, no escape.
Central to Van Zyl’s exploration of the individual’s relationship to wider culture is his recurrent use of architectural structures and ritualised forms of behaviour. Although his works are often propelled by a character’s quest, they unfold within a pre-ordained structure that suggests a level of surveillance and control. In Lost Property the bureau functions as a system that determines when a character can move from one space to another, while drone shots of the street scenes suggest some unknowable, omnipresent force.7 In other films Van Zyl uses a range of structuring devices to affect the ways that the characters interact with each other or the development of a narrative. In Escape from Fort Bravo, for example, the dilapidated film set, which was used for spaghetti Westerns, became a means to explore the performance of Western masculinity. In Surrender, a pneumatic tube messaging system formed the starting point for film about a dance marathon in which contestants move between states of exhaustion and recovery; and in Sweat Exchange (2024), a fake sauna repurposed from a film set provides the stage for a character feeding off the sweat of their double, only for them to eventually swap places.
This reuse of cultural detritus grounds Van Zyl’s work in a distinctly material practice, where a single object or site becomes the seed from which a whole world – both real and imaginary – is created. He began making long-form films after building his sculptures into expansive installations that resembled the remnants of a set. Liquid Gold: Act 3 (2014), produced while he was studying at the Slade School of Art, University College London, was a one-night exhibition assembled from discarded elements from film and theatre productions. The artist transformed these materials into what he described as a ‘glitchy cruising site’, projecting short clips into a makeshift backstage area. Drinks were served in watermelons and cabbages, a nod to his research on foley sound effects, where such objects might be used to simulate the sound of a head being crushed.9 This fascination with material transformation – what Van Zyl likens to transubstantiation – is, for him, intimately tied to the art of film-making, which he describes as a process ‘about belief and transformation and magic […] and believing together to make something new’. Well-versed in histories of cinema and performance, Van Zyl traces his influences to a teenage encounter with ritualised forms of performance art, such as Hermann Nitsch’s Orgies Mysteries Theatre (1962–88), the animations of Jan Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers and DIY squat culture.
Through these various modes of reenactment – both in the material components of the work and the repeated actions of his characters – Van Zyl plays with the notion of ‘liveness’ typically associated with performance, and how it might reshape ideas of the body within the online space. The environments of his films spill out into the gallery, implicating the viewer in the action and creating a sense of trespass into the hallowed space of art. This logic also extends to Van Zyl’s sculptures and drawings, in which figures are often shown in states of containment – either in relation to another body or enclosed in some form of vessel. At the entrance to Lost Property, for example, two figures straddling a pole reach out in opposite directions but are indelibly intertwined. In Six Scintillating Sinners (In Vitro) (2020–21) FIG.10, a series of heads – made of cake, no less – are sealed in transparent chambers, and in Loon FIG.11 an inflated latex creature appears trapped inside a mirrored box. Drawing together thematics of exposure and concealment, these works form analogies for how subcultural practices are often aestheticised, packaged and contained within the gallery context.
Such works draw attention not only to the delicate and precarious state of the worlds that Van Zyl creates, but also the sense of humour that runs throughout his practice. Many of his films adopt a camp sensibility that toys with the viewer’s expectations and disrupts the conventions of the genres that he explores. It is precisely these contradictions that make his work so vital, aligning with his belief that art can hold a space for nuance ‘in a climate that often looks for definite [answers]’. Van Zyl’s work invites us to sit with the trouble and the mess, to find the potential in the unknown and try to dig our way out – if we wish.
