Billy Parker speaks with the artist about how he learnt to make films, performance without resolution, and the Is It Cake phenomenon.
A gaping, carnival mouth in the basement of the Slade was an unlikely place to find a portal to another realm. This was my first encounter with Jenkin van Zyl’s work, who, at the early ripeness of an undergraduate show, had demonstrated his total reality warping abilities. His practice engorges almost every process: digesting into explosive and intoxicating built environments. Years later, I was working at Rose Easton during van Zyl’s show, Vore. In the centre of the windowless gallery was a fluorescent lit perspex tank housing a spiked creature frozen in the process of swallowing a human whole. It shifted and dis-formed, as though it came alive at night when no one was watching. Each morning, I prised the heavy perspex tank lid ajar, arms buckling, as van Zyl prodded the inflatable sculpture back to composure.
I recently met the artist after his first institutional exhibition, Lost Property, at ARoS, Denmark. He found me smoking outside of Somerset House and whisked me through its maze of spiralling staircases and endless corridors. His studio is a former shooting range crammed with rails of extravagant costumes, shelves of masks, mannequins and other-worldly detritus. Reminiscent of the wings of a West End stage, we naturally began talking of notorious Divas and showgirls.
Billy Parker: I love Amanda Lear! Is she still alive?
Jenkin van Zyl: She’s alive! Have you seen Enigma? It’s a documentary by Zackary Drucker that follows Amanda Lear and April Ashley, about the complexities of trans ageing.
BP: One of my favourite videos is Lear and David Bowie trying to film a TV segment. They’re both high on heroin, stumbling through a meta text: “Who are you… Life is too short for questions… Well, what are you? I can see you are trying to invent something… Who. Are. You!”
JVZ: Probably strung out on coke.
BP: I first saw it whenan older gay sat me down and force-fed me YouTube videos à la Clockwork Orange ft. toothpicks.
JVZ: The intergenerational pass down. I love a musical medley shoved down my throat.
BP: Everyone needs a substance-induced content-pass-down session! What’s in your repertoire?
JVZ: There’s a fierce video of Dena Cass lip-syncing to This is My Life. She gets ready on stage, puts on tarantula lashes, finishes early, spraying perfume for ages. That does it for me, honey. Off with the pantheon of Divas!
BP: Are these [pointing to a cluster of mannequins crammed above a cabinet] from Lost Property?
JVZ: No. Those sculptures are ball-jointed dolls/weather vane sculptures on motors that erratically move and spin. Around them is a transparent gauze with images of the city we filmed in.
BP: The fake London city in Bulgaria?
JVZ: Yes. It was built to stand in for any fringe metropolis, so it has weird anachronistic elements. Very eerie and frightening. We used it as a desolate alienated cityscape.
BP: Were you allowed to film there?
JVZ: Yes, but it was difficult. My first film was shot on abandoned Spaghetti Western sets in Spain. We broke in, shooting scraps of footage before getting caught. I learnt how to make films through that adrenaline-driven process. The studio in Bulgaria felt like a Lynchian nightmare. The production offices were in these long, endless corridors. You go to the boardroom, and there’s a guy with a glass eye smoking a cigar, holding a whisky at the end of the room.
BP: I also loved the concrete theatre. How do you scout locations?
JVZ: That was an old music hall in Islington that burnt down in the seventies. It’s been stuck in development hell. It has a duelling panopticon-y/amphitheatre quality to it because of its vacancy of stage and seating. I like the idea of entropy: spaces that are stuck or suspended in progress.
BP: What comes first, location or narrative?
JVZ: It weaves in and out. I conceive the films as a rabbit warren. I dig research holes that cohere in strange and serendipitous ways. It’s maximalist world-building. Lost Property has a triple ouroboros structure – a snake eating its tail. Three characters. Three locations. Three narratives. Suturing them together are portals that lead us in and out of disparate places. It’s a Frankensteinian Process.
BP: I struggle watching films in a gallery. I hate jumping in the middle, so the ouroboros structure makes sense. Is there something more than just–
JVZ: The formal constraints of the gallery? A gallery distorts narrative continuity. I use that frustration as a launch pad. There’s also the character’s labour: as long as the power’s on, they’re stuck in a perpetual state of performance. I want to complicate the hero’s journey arc, the direction towards resolution. Historical progress is a fantasy lie. In cities, life is deteriorating rapidly. People are alienated and removed, but we’re also in an abundant period of rapid technological progress. There are moments of collapse and renewal: ecstasy followed by regret. A traumatic loop.
BP: Endless meta cannibalism. In Lost Property, a character eats its own cake double. It reminded me of Gabourey Sidibe sitting on a chair before realising… “Bitch, is this cake!”
JVZ: The Is It Cake phenomenon is so popular because trust in the real is so raw: a fascination with inauthenticity or simulacra. I’m looking at different forms of desire, yearning, and the material dump of the world.
BP: Another character finds an audition poster for the film that they are already acting in?
JVZ: They’re stuck in a state of endless audition: a caffeinated, hysterical propulsion forwards to improve. It’s linked to humiliation cycles and self-rejection.
BP: What’s your fascination with doppelgängers?
JVZ: Another proxy for distrust and instability. In a different film, Sweat Exchange, one character’s sweat releases a hallucinogenic fluid that propels the other into a go-go dance. They swap endlessly – a metaphor for how we drain and renew. Communities formed around fantasy are often impacted by the systems that are being escaped. I use parallel narratives between the fantastical and desirous protagonist, the constraining systems of organisations and bureaucracy. The characters aren’t searching for lost objects, but for parts of themselves that have been forgotten.
BP: You’re investigating the liquid nature of identity, yet your own personal identity has always been very solid.
JVZ: I love decadent dressing, but there’s a punishing limitation to being a fixed and stable sovereign self. Even though I present as stable, I’m more interested when I’m relieved of that – moments that dissolve or liquify the body. Multiplicity, melting and escape: the politics of refusing to engage with reality.
BP: What is reality?
JVZ: Well, honey, you tell me. What does it mean to create new versions of reality?
BP: When I watched your film, I thought, “That’s what would happen if gays were in charge of the world.”
JVZ: Don’t let them!
BP: Your exhibition at Rose Easton reminded me of the film Splash, where they imprison a mermaid in a research facility.
JVZ: I also made cake sculptures entombed in freezer units. Are you being protected from it, or is it being protected from you? Vitrine enclosures become infinity pools.
BP: Your static work somehow still performs.
JVZ: I struggle making autonomous objects, potent things that don’t rely on extensive world-building.
BP: Do you consider yourself a filmmaker?
JVZ: I think so – everything I do is established through that journey. I want to make script-based films and ditch the masks. I work with disciplined dancers who have their own sensibilities or friends who exist chaotically in club environments. I haven’t tapped into vocal and facial performance.
BP: Do you write a script even when the characters don’t talk?
JVZ: The backbone is task-based improvisation. For Lost Property, I planted a movement director who delivered absurd tasks to the performers. It adds texture to the 360° lived environment. It can feel very real. I’d like to shoot something in a reality-show format, where people live on set.
BP: There was a show called Shattered where contestants had to stay awake for seven days to win £100,000. Money was deducted if they fell asleep. Hallucinatory. I thought that was incredible. You couldn’t ethically do that now.
JVZ: Entertainment has become cruelty-driven due to platforms predicated on addictive spirals of high-intensity content in rapid indistinctions. It’s led to rage-bait culture: the Bonnie-Blue-ification. [Jazz hands]
BP: I’m still waiting for the zoo.
JVZ: Darling, I was away when the petting zoo was supposed to happen. I was so upset. Now she’s doing testicle checks with doctors while you fuck her. There’s also Mr Beast, and the French guy who was murdered on that streaming platform?
BP: That sounds insane.
JVZ: The fourth most subscribed person on French Twitch was kept awake for one hundred hours while four other guys poured oil on him, made him choke on paint, slapped him so hard that his head spun. During the stream, he texted his mum saying, “They have me trapped in a death spiral,” then died of a heart attack.
BP: Who is Mr Beast?
JVZ: The most famous person on the planet. He makes real-life Squid Game content on YouTube: live on a boat with no food or water for one hundred days to win a million pounds. High money. High stakes.
BP: I don’t know him.
JVZ: The spectacle, rage-bait, image overload, along with the overconsumption of simulated AI imagery, is making for a very numb climate.
BP: And you’re going to use that…
JVZ: We’ve burnt the way that we spend time. There was a naive expectation that after COVID, people would invest in congregating. The financial haemorrhaging of the city has meant it’s not the way things have gone. People are more conservative and interior.
BP: You facilitate congregation by making films.
JVZ: There’s such a burst of energy when everyone comes together on set. I like the travelling circus element; how unexpected and magically diverting it can be. Although it’s bookended by a miserable six months on either side, locked away in a tomb, editing. It’s brutal. I didn’t do anything for Christmas. I didn’t do anything for New Year’s. I was just locked.
BP: What if your characters talked?
JVZ: Dialogue and faces are scary. The masks conceal, but they also enable. It’s a good time to take that off. Calm costumes, no visage, no disguise.
BP: A rebirth. Have you written dialogue before?
JVZ: There’s been text on screen, interior monologues, but they are retrofitted. My earlier films were frantic, and the narrative was formed in the editing room. Text has become the way to bridge everything. It’s one thing to write a monologue versus a dialogue that needs to be tested on set. Are you an improv queen?
BP: No, I love text. I like the mystery of the puzzle, piecing things together from fragments between words. I can’t walk around the room and be a firework…
JVZ: I make everyone on set do improv. The humiliation ritual, to disembowel. I went to see You Me Bum Bum Train, a show where you have to perform improv through different quickfire settings. I began earnestly as myself, but realised that was the most painful way to do it. Either way, you lose. You’re meant to feel mega uncomfortable.
BP: What did you wear?
JVZ: A hoodie and black trousers. I wasn’t going to do the jester routine through that. Have you seen anything recently?
BP: I’ve stopped going to the theatre seriously. I just want a really good musical. Big. Jazzy. Fosse.
JVZ: Jamie Lloyd would do a good Chicago revival. Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips as Velma Kelly and Roxie Heart. Two warring OnlyFans creators.
BP: That would be delicious. I think that’s beyond him, though.
