JENKIN VAN ZYL is an artist and filmmaker who practices across film, performance, writing and sculpture, constructing hallucinatory, theatrical worlds that explore the power and politics of fantasy. Drawing from fringe communities, he explores the vital world-building that occurs within these environments, while examining how broader societal politics infiltrate worlds designed to escape them. Jenkin van Zyl has been a resident at Somerset House Studios for three years.

Enclosure is a large-scale installation and film that fills the Lancaster Rooms at Somerset House. The film explores what happens to obsolete technologies that have outlasted the society that created them, examining the desire for self-preservation in a world defined by extreme commodification.

Enclosure is set within a decaying facility that’s attempting to hold on to its former glory. It once allowed tourists to inhabit “Cherubs”, the replicated bodies of celebrities. Over a single day, Mercy, a former starlet who lent the programme her likeness, arrives to terminate her own Cherub. The ritual doesn't go to plan.

We asked Jenkin some questions and here is what he had to say.

You set yourself on fire for the shot once. Now you made Enclosure, in which self-preservation is central. Would you say you’re any good at it?

No lol, I’m not particularly interested in self-preservation as an ambition, it’s far too entangled with self-optimisation and branding.

The new film Enclosure follows Mercy, a fabulous starlet whose body was once replicated for tourists to inhabit. Now the business has failed and she’s being charged to keep her own likeness alive, so what once earned her money has become an obligation. She arrives wanting to end the arrangement, but her double, the Cherub, has experiences and desires of her own. And so that’s where this idea of preservation becomes complicated: Mercy wants to leave an earlier copy of herself behind, but that version wants a life beyond the purpose it was made for.

Our Ukrainian name, ГРІШНИЦЯ, means sinner, but TEMPTRESS better reflects our audience. What does TEMPTRESS mean to you, and what’s your favourite sin?

A temptress makes the life you’re supposed to be living suddenly seem optional, and I’m susceptible! I like the detour, the peculiar situation, people who help make things weirder. Of someone expanding your sense of what’s possible without making the dreary promise that it’ll be good for you.

But as for sinning, I’m not sure I’m interested in the classification...quite a lot of what makes life worthwhile has been called sinful...

You keep locking your creatures behind glass. In Enclosure, one finally gets out. So who is the glass actually for: them or us?

We shot the enclosures for the film inside a set of Cold War bunkers in Suffolk, dragging up their interiors somewhat like the peep-show in Paris, Texas. I wanted to play with the tension between an interior organised around desire and an exterior built to anticipate violence, a place so sweet and so seductive that it seems to require bulletproofing. Or is it the other way around, that it’s so dangerous that it has to seduce you into entering?

I was thinking about luxury prepper bunkers and their promise that a particular way of life can continue while the world outside collapses. In Enclosure, the facility’s fortifications offer a related reassurance: that the pleasures of an extraordinary technology can be enjoyed while its dangers remain contained. But who controls that boundary determines who gets protection and whose body is kept available for use.
Here the glass can keep the Cherub in place, but it can’t make her predictable and she uses their intimate connection to manipulate an escape in Mercy’s name. I wanted to leave something unresolved in that departure, though. She has somewhere to get away from, but the film doesn’t promise what she’ll find outside, or what she might do there.

Live forever: yes or no?

No! It’s a vampire question: into what future, and with who? I’m greedy for experience, and there are whole lives I haven’t even thought to want yet...but forever feels like an absurd vote of confidence in this timeline!

Last Question. One dead technology you’d bring back?

I love technologies that creak, moan and vibrate, so I’d love more pneumatic tube systems. They’re still occasionally used in hospitals, so perhaps not entirely dead, but I have always loved the Lamson systems that used to send cash and paperwork shooting around department stores in little canisters. To my total shock and joy I later ended up as the custodian of an almost complete Lamson system from the last one still functioning anywhere, taken out of the department store Jacksons in Reading. An archivist called Robin Adcroft had salvaged it when the store closed, and after he died his husband passed it on to me.

I reconfigured it for my project Surrender as a tentacular nervous system, carrying messages through the film’s hotel and extending out into the installation. I wanted visitors to feel they’d been shrunk down and were wandering through the passages behind its walls. There’s something just wonderful about the sheer physicality of it: you send a message off in a little capsule, hear it disappear into the building, and wait for something to come back. I wish they were everywhere!

Enclosure is on at Somerset House Studios, London, 24 September – 29 November 2026, then tours to HOME, Manchester, 26 February – 9 May 2027. 
Co-commissioned with Film and Video Umbrella and HOME Manchester.

Images – Courtesy of Jenkin van Zyl