Jenkin van Zyl

Two mangled half-rat half-human faces sit in mini-fridges under red light.

An image of jenkin van zyl's installation. There are 2 fridges holding mangled heads, panels from an aeroplane and eerie red lighting.

Image of Jenkin van Zyl's installation at Tramway. The room sits in eerie red light with strange panels of an aeroplane, a watertank, pipework and fridge.

The image shows Jenkin van Zyl's installation at Tramway. Framed by an aeroplane window is a projection screen showing strange characters in lab coats.

Strange characters with half-rat faces huddle together

The image shows a projection screen. The screen shows a character stood with arms outstretched, back to the camera, in black lingerie and a black wig. They are in a barren snowy landscape.

Image of Jenkin van Zyl's installation at Tramway. The room sits in eerie red light. There are aeroplane seats laid out and aeroplane window panels along the wall.

Framed by an aeroplane window, Jenkin van Zyl's installation sits in eerie red light. There is a fridge, water-tank and strange pipework.

A grotesque half-rat half-human face is in a fridge

Tramway

Taking on the dungeon-like qualities of Tramway’s T4 Theatre, Jenkin van Zyl created a new immersive installation comprising both sculpture and video built out of the remnants of decommissioned airplanes. Machines of Love, the ambitious new film at the centre of the installation, was a hallucinogenic horror which lures us beneath a decaying Viking film set into a casino of buried aircrafts, continuing van Zyl’s process of guerrilla filmmaking in abandoned Hollywood film sets.

A sextet of ghouls arrive here on the promise of a Good Fantasy; setting in motion an erotic game of destruction and renewal. Caught in the Machines’ lottery of role-play, they breed cakes of their own likeness into the fuselage: a rush of passion that ends, inevitably, in a grisly conclusion. Attentive to the mutability and rotation of roles, the film free-falls through the terror, excitement, panic, and anticipation held within self-creation in a rumination on the enduring power and politics of fantasy.

Machines of Love (2020/1) is a film directed by Jenkin van Zyl, starring Alex Margo Arden as Number 97, Emmanuel Awuni as Number 29, Kevin Brennan as Number 163, Danielle Goldman and Eugenia Shishkina as Number 2, Slid Needham as Number 310 and Ted Rodgers as Number 237 (with snow Number 237 played by Jenkin van Zyl). With editing, sound, set, costume and camera operation by Jenkin van Zyl, cakes by Magda Viljoen, title from the short story ‘Machines of Love’ by Brittany Newell and made with special thanks to the assistance on set by Liv Preston, Magda Viljoen and Betsie van Zyl.

Commissioned by Glasgow International and supported by Henry Moore Foundation, the Royal Academy Schools, the Artists’ Collecting Society, the Horse Hospital, David Palmer and Amanda Wilkinson, with on-location filming in Iceland facilitated by the Stannus Grey Robinson travel prize