EXHIBITION: Sat 19th – Sunday 20th October 2019, 12-6pm
OPENING: Fri 18th October, 6.30pm - 10.30pm
The Horse Hospital presents a new site-specific film commission by Jenkin van Zyl developed over the period of a residency in The Horse Hospital’s gallery space and utilising selected items from The Contemporary Wardrobe Collection.
OBLIVION INDUSTRY is an immersive installation comprised of a surround-sound film shown across three curved-screens coiled around the pillars of the exhibition space in a labyrinthine loop. The film works through genres of cinematic violence, interrogating signs and symbols of power and social mythologies whilst responding to The Horse Hospital’s twenty-five year history of counter-cultural artistic activities, its equestrian history and cavernous architecture.
Jenkin van Zyl b. 1993, London, UK, where he lives and works. Jenkin van Zyl is interested in the potentialities in having fun with what hurts you. The artist’s most recent project, Looners (2019), was filmed in the immense ruins of Hollywood film sets in the Atlas Mountains and thinks through community building, disaster tourism and hedonism in a conflict between cruelty and pleasure. He thinks of his films as a ‘a set of games played on thinner and thinner ice, until we believe we can walk on water.’
This exhibition is part of The Horse Hospital’s Psychic Communities programme of exhibitions and events looking at community-forming mechanisms that operate beyond verbal and visual transmission through sensual, sexual, spiritual, embodied and tacit forms of connection. The programme aims to bring into focus the emotional infrastructures inherent to forms of mutual care and inter-dependency and their collective enunciation. Psychic Communities runs throughout October & November 2019.