Jenkin van Zyl’s World of Enclosure

Event: Jenkin van Zyl: Enclosure

Venue: Somerset House

Location: Strand, London WC2R 1LA, UK

Dates: 24 September – 29 November 2026

Enclosure, a newly commissioned film and installation by Somerset House Studios artist Jenkin van Zyl, opened this week in the Lancaster Rooms at Somerset House. The project is van Zyl’s first major London exhibition and imagines a world in which technological systems have continued developing long after the ideas that once justified them have begun to fall apart. Somerset House

A Facility Built for Replication

At the centre of Enclosure is a decaying facility once devoted to replication. Visitors to this fictional institution were able to temporarily occupy versions of other people’s lives, creating doubles whose existence was maintained through an elaborate administrative system.

Each year, a ritual known as Founding Day brings the original participants, or Donors, back into contact with their doubles, called Cherubs. They must decide whether those copies should continue or be terminated, turning what sounds like a bureaucratic procedure into something closer to a ceremony of separation. Somerset House

When the Copy Becomes Unstable

The film follows Mercy, a starlet who previously allowed the programme to reproduce her likeness. She returns intending to end the arrangement, but the distinction between Mercy and her Cherub begins to break down instead.

That collapse gives van Zyl a way of approaching a familiar technological question from an unusually bodily direction: what happens when a copy stops functioning as something safely secondary to an original? Rather than treating replication simply as a futuristic device, Enclosure turns it into a problem of identity, attachment and control.

Maintenance After Meaning

One of the work’s more unsettling ideas concerns maintenance itself. The facility continues to operate even as the logic that produced it becomes increasingly difficult to defend. Procedures remain in place, rituals are repeated and the system keeps itself alive because continuation has become easier than reconsideration.

In that sense, Enclosure is less interested in spectacular technological failure than in what happens when technologies and institutions survive their original usefulness. Van Zyl presents upkeep as something that can become strangely defensive: a way of preserving structures even after their purpose has begun to disappear. Somerset House similarly frames the project around the possibility that technological development may move faster than the meanings people construct around it. Somerset House

Building the World Beyond the Film

The installation carries the fictional facility out into the gallery. Audiences encounter the physical remains of its world through fairground-style signage, office materials and deteriorating fragments of institutional life.

The effect is to make Enclosure something more than a film screened inside an exhibition space. The Lancaster Rooms become part of the fiction itself, allowing viewers to move through a system that appears to be continuing its routines even after the structure supporting them has started to collapse.

A London Premiere Before Manchester

Developed in residence at Somerset House Studios, Enclosure was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, Somerset House Studios and HOME, Manchester. Its Somerset House presentation runs until 29 November before the work travels to HOME, where it is scheduled to open in February 2027. Somerset House

For van Zyl, the project turns replication, self-preservation and institutional decay into a single uneasy environment. What begins as speculative fiction ultimately lands on a recognisable contemporary anxiety: not simply that technology might change too quickly, but that the systems built around it may continue functioning long after anyone can clearly explain why.

Website Somerset House