“Vore/Loon/Beast/Ruins/Fantasy/Pleasure”

A meandering through my film projects, Escape from Fort Bravo, Looners, Machines of Love and Rat King, via the doors of the Vore/the Loon/the Beast/the Ruins/the Fantasy/the Pleasure.

Jenkin Van Zyl is an artist and filmmaker based in London, with a multidisciplinary practice comprising film, performance, writing and sculpture.

Van Zyl’s past projects have been initiated by guerrilla filmmaking undertaken on the guarded ruins of Hollywood movie sets. In these films fantastical communities enact bewildering rituals that play with the magnificence and limitations of the body; of stunt cowboys in a foley sound studio, of ghouls breeding cakes in aircrafts or of inflatable beasts hazed at a desert fortress. Here binaries of the front and back-stage, self and other, desire and revulsion, and ruin and repair are discarded in favour for multiplicity, instability, and deviance.

Jenkin van Zyl (b.1993) received a postgraduate degree from the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2021 and was the recipient of the RA Gold Medal Prize. Current and forthcoming exhibitions include The Horror Show!, Somerset House, London (2022), Barbe á Papa, CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux, and a major new film project Surrender premiering at at Edel Assanti in January 2023. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Machines of Love, Tramway, Glasgow (2021); Hors Pistes, Pompidou Centre, Paris (2020); Kiss My Genders, Hayward Gallery, London (2019) and Oblivion Industry, The Horse Hospital, London (2019).