Right, this one is good. But it’s not easy. Then again, I don’t think any of Jenkin van Zyl’s films – or performances, or sculptures, for that matter – are meant to be. The worlds he creates aren’t easy to make sense of, and they’re not places you’d want to live in. They’re grotesque, chaotic, and filled with technologies, rituals and systems that seem to have taken on lives of their own.
His latest creation, Enclosure, has taken over a wing of Somerset House, and comprises of a film and narrative installation that spills out from the screen and into the surrounding rooms, filling them with the signage, photographs and general detritus of a fictional universe. In this world, people known as ‘Donors’ can have replicas of themselves made, called ‘Cherubs’, grown from a single tooth. Stay with me. These doubles were once the basis of a strange kind of tourism where visitors could temporarily inhabit somebody else’s life (‘a little holiday inside someone extraordinary’), as one of the facility’s workers (dressed in a pink milkmaid outfit) puts it.
The installation's narrative focuses on Mercy, a former starlet who lent her likeness to the programme, and appears to have been something of a Cherub sensation. ‘Never before has a Cherub attracted such attention’ reads one peeling poster bearing five stars. But by the time Mercy returns to the facility, the good times are over. The place is decaying, the programme has become obsolete, and Mercy is there to terminate her contract – and, with it, her double. Still with me? Good. Because for all its freakiness, Enclosure doesn’t feel entirely removed from reality. This is a world that embraced a new technology first and worried about the consequences later. Just the other day, my Instagram feed was full of robots walking down a catwalk at Milan Fashion Week, so perhaps van Zyl isn’t reaching quite as far into the future as you’d think.
For all its freakiness, Enclosure doesn’t feel entirely removed from reality
That ability to dream up worlds like this one – and then go to extraordinary lengths to actually make them real – explains why, just five years out of art school, van Zyl has already found his way into shows at the Hayward Gallery, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum and Centre Pompidou, and many of the world’s other most major museums.
Van Zyl really does commit to the bit. His early films were properly DIY: Fort Bravo was shot on abandoned spaghetti-western sets in Spain with just a friend and a Flip cam. For the same project, van Zyl bought flame paste, covered himself in it and set himself on fire in his flat. Looners took him to the ruins of Hollywood sets in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, while Machines of Love ended up in the Icelandic wilderness (he went into hypothermic shock filming this one). Shot between an abandoned polytechnic and Cold War-era bunkers, Enclosure is the first film he’s made at a location he’s actually had permission to be on.
His devotion to building a truly immersive world that you can properly inhabit is all over the show. There’s stuff everywhere: battered fairground signage, piles of office debris, old adverts and photographs, all seemingly salvaged from the facility’s better days. The issue in this case is that van Zyl is so focused on the details of his alternate world that the story has gotten a little lost. ‘Reality is catching up to my dreams’, say the posters left in a printer tray, while a nearby mantelpiece is filled with Mercy’s ‘Cherub of the Month’ photographs, their faces scribbled over in lipstick. What actually happened at this sinister abandoned facility remains something of a mystery.
Enclosure is messy, utopian and dystopian all at once, and there are moments when you’re not sure whether you should be trying to untangle its logic or simply surrendering to the chaos. In the end, I surrendered – and getting lost in it turned out to be half the fun.
