Lot 50 - Jenkin Van Zyl - Sweat Exchange

Polaroid on paper
2025
A6 (10x15cm)
Original Artwork
Signed on Verso
Curated by Moriah Ogunbiyi

About

Jenkin van Zyl (b. 1993) is an artist and filmmaker based in London. With a multidisciplinary practice typically centred around film, van Zyl constructs immersive installations which give birth to fantastical communities inhabiting transient spaces: stunt cowboys in a foley sound studio, doppelgängers in a sweat exchange, or rats competing in love hotels.

Drawing from the sites of fringe communities—spaces where alternative ways of living are mapped out—van Zyl looks to the vital and complex world building that occurs within these spaces, but also how microcosms of the politics encountered in the ‘real world’ can crop up in the worlds which are built to escape them.

Conjured with a queer irreverence, one that is attentive to the power and politics of fantasy, van Zyl’s work discards binaries of the front and back-stage, self and other, desire and revulsion, and ruin and repair in favour of multiplicity, instability, and entropy.

Jenkin van Zyl (b. 1993) graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2021 and was the recipient of the RA Gold Medal Prize.

Education

2017-2021 Postgraduate, Fine Art, Royal Academy Schools, London, UK
2022-2016 BA (Hons), Fine Art Sculpture, Slade School of Fine Art, London, UK
2011 Foundation Diploma, Camberwell College of Fine Art, London, UK

Solo Exhibitions

2025
Lost Property, ArOs Museum, Aarhus

2024
Dance of the Sleepwalkers, Edel Assanti, London, UK
Palace of Wasted Footsteps, Hua International, Berlin, Germany

2023
Surrender, FACT Liverpool, UK
Surrender, Edel Assanti, London, UK

2022

Vore, Rose Easton, London, UK

2021
Machines of Love, Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland

2020
Cabin Pressure, Amanda Wilkinson Gallery, London, UK

2019
Oblivion Industry, The Horse Hospital, London, UK

Group Exhibitions

2025
Ah! To Have A Mouth, Rose Easton, London, UK

2024
Transmediale, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin, Germany
Phenomena, Elders Collectief, Kortrijk, Belgium
Figure Figure, Contemporary Art Center of Nimes, Nimes, France

2023
Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK
A Curtain, that is a room on Uranus, Hua International, Beijing, China
Hallen#4, K60 at Wilhelm Hallen, Berlin, Germany
Wink Wink, The Whitaker Museum & Art Gallery, Lancashire, UK
Hemispheres, Alice Black Gallery, London, UK

2022
The Horror Show!, Somerset House, London, UK
Barbe a Papa, CAPC, Bordeaux, France

2021
Machines of Love, Royal Academy Schools, London, UK
Casting the Runes, Harlesden High St, London, UK
MELTDOWN, Ridley Road Project Space, London

2020
Hors Pistes 2020, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
Antwerp Queer Arts festival, Galerie Verbeeck-Van Dyck, Antwerp, Belgium
Curtain Call, Piccadilly Square billboard lights, Circa 2020, London, UK

2019
Kiss my Genders, Hayward Gallery, London, UK

Gallery Representations

Edel Assanti, London, K

Statement about AOAP Submitted Artwork

This polaroid was taken during the making of van Zyl's short film Sweat Exchange (2024). The film was conceived to loop endlessly within a film set of a Sauna and looks towards themes of resource scarcity, bodily labour, and the cyclical nature of production and consumption. Set within the pit of a drained swimming pool, Sweat Exchange creates a microcosm where sweat has transcended its biological function in order to become a hallucinogenic commodity in an architecture gripped by drought. Within this pool a conveyor of cartoonishly monstrous doppelgangers move through an endless cycle of sweat extraction and go-go dancing. As one character's depletion fuels another's frenetic performance, the film complicates the borders between producer and consumer, observer and participant.