Jenkin van Zyl’s « Palace of Wasted Footsteps » solo exhibition for Gallery Weekend Berlin, revisits the intense world-building of « Surrender, » his project that draws upon his research into 1930s American dance marathons and the ephemeral world of (Japanese) love hotels, hourly hotels for rendezvous into the night. At the intersection of history and fantasy, van Zyl’s sculptures—five competing doppelgängers for intimate dance duos—explore the brutal beauty of endurance and the thin line between competition and survival. They are compelled by a mysterious energy drink, called limitless growth, pushing them ever to the brink of bodily collapse, despair and grace dialectically locked into a kind of « rat race » of self-imposed sel-obsessed success or community, endurance versus surrender, they can not go on, they must go on.
Pictures by : @joeclark.photo
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