In June 2025, ARoS will present Lost Property, a major new video installation by London-based artist Jenkin Van Zyl (b. 1993, UK). This will be the first exhibition in the Salling Gallery, ARoS’ new subterranean exhibition space dedicated to annual contemporary art commissions.
Jenkin van Zyl is an artist and filmmaker with a multidisciplinary practice comprising film, performance, writing and sculpture. Through his expansive, hallucinatory video installations, Jenkin van Zyl constructs fantastical communities inhabiting transient spaces: stunt cowboys in a Foley sound studio, doppelgängers in a sweat exchange, and rats competing in dance marathons. Drawing from sites of fringe subcultures where alternative ways of living are mapped out, his work examines both the vital world-building that occurs within these spaces and how microcosms of broader societal politics can emerge within them. In his distinctive work, Van Zyl challenges our understanding of identity, belonging and power structures by discarding traditional binaries in favour of multiplicity and instability.
Commissioned especially for ARoS’ new gallery, Van Zyl’s ambitious new work will transform the space into The Lost Property Bureau: a mysterious bureaucratic facility where protagonists return seeking their lost doppelgängers. The film’s looping narrative follows three characters through destabilising administrative procedures as they undergo transformative encounters with their doubles. The work, created in collaboration with Van Zyl’s close community of queer performers, dancers and musicians, suggests that in our increasingly insecure present, transformation might come through embracing rather than resisting our own unravelling.
Visitors to Lost Property will enter an immersive scenography of gauze backdrops that simulate a film set of an abandoned London street. Mirroring the film’s looping narrative structures, the installation guides the visitor along a pathway spiraling into a lavender-hued screening room at the centre of the gallery. Around the gallery, spinning weathervanes of the film’s characters rotate endlessly, searching for direction.
“Lost Property speaks to our time, where reality often feels like a fever dream. We live in a world where major crises are filtered through layers of simulation and spectacle. With its dark humour, the work attempts to reflect on how we can rethink ourselves and our systems in the chaotic time that is our present. Lost Property shows how identity splits and transforms and how we navigate a world of contradictions,”
says Jenkin van Zyl
“The new Salling Gallery will be unique in Denmark in providing a space for artists working across artistic mediums for example film, video, installation and performance to create site-specific works. The opening marks the first stage of ARoS’ largest and most extensive expansion to date, which also includes the forthcoming installation The Dome, a Skyspace by James Turrell,”
says Rebecca Matthews, Director at ARoS.
The exhibition is realised at ARoS in close collaboration between Jenkin van Zyl and curator Ellen Drude Skeel Langvold.
Jenkin van Zyl: Lost Property, 20th June 2025 – 25th May 2026 ARoS, Aarhus, Denmark
The exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Augustinus Foundation, the New Carlsberg Foundation and Ege Carpets. The opening of the new subterranean gallery has been realised thanks to a donation from the Salling Foundations.
In connection with the exhibition, ARoS will publish a fully illustrated catalogue.
About the artist
Jenkin van Zyl (b. 1993, London) graduated from the RA Schools, London, in 2021 and was the recipient of the RA Gold Medal Prize. Recent exhibitions include Transmediale, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2024); Dance of the Sleepwalkers, Edel Assanti, London, UK (2024); Surrender, FACT Liverpool, UK (2023); Surrender, Edel Assanti, London, UK (2023); The Horror Show!, Somerset House, London, UK (2022); Barbe à Papa, CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France (2022); Machines of Love, Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland (2021); Hors Pistes, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2020); Kiss My Genders, Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2019), and Oblivion Industry, The Horse Hospital, London, UK (2019).
