
Jenkin van Zyl
Nothing could have prepared me for Jenkin van Zyl’s extreme visual extravaganza, the nearly fifty-minute film Surrender, 2023. Not the enormous, room-size, rodent-faced, silver inflatable hellmouth at the gallery’s entrance, or the subsequent corridors, filled with a tangle of Lamson pneumatic tubes (an antiquated building-wide tentacular delivery system). Not the four white-sheeted hotel beds, equipped with Soviet-era medicine cabinets, which provided the screening-room’s seating. Van Zyl’s scattergun panoply of interests read like random Google search terms, encompassing not only theatrical