Diego Marcon’s Monelle, 2017, is a violent work. Not in its visual content—there is no gore or physical abuse—but in the way it cultivates somatic unease. The nearly fourteen-minute film is made up of just thirty individual shots, each lasting no more than a second, with the screen going dark for several moments between them. We spend the majority of the film engulfed in darkness, our only sensory input the flickers of unexposed celluloid on the screen and ambient shuffling noises. In the sharp, abrupt flashes of imagery—each accompanied by a loud metallic pop—we move through the Casa del Fascio,

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