Enclosure: The upcoming film commissioned by HOME
An immersive installation and film, coming soon
Alongside Film and Video Umbrella and Somerset House Studios, HOME is proud to commission a new film: Enclosure.
Enclosure is a new film by Somerset House Studios artist Jenkin Van Zyl. The film will explore a culture where technological advancement has outpaced our ability to make sense of it. It will be presented within an immersive installation.
After premiering at Somerset House Studios, Enclosure will open at HOME from 26 February to 16 May 2027.
Learn more about this exciting new project...
About the film
Set within a decaying facility that once allowed tourists to inhabit replicas of other people, Enclosure unfolds over a single day known as Founding Day, the annual window in which Donors must renew or terminate their doubles, known as Cherubs. When the protagonist, Mercy, a starlet who lent her likeness to the programme, arrives to terminate her double, the ritual intended to sever their connection instead draws them closer, until the line between them disappears entirely.
At its core, Enclosure asks what happens when systems built on desire and self-preservation outlast the conditions that created them. In a world where meaning erodes faster than systems can adapt, Enclosure presents maintenance as a form of denial, as institutions, technologies, and individuals persist in upkeep beyond its purpose. The installation extends Enclosure into a large-scale immersive environment where visitors move through the material remains of the facility—fairground signage, holograms, inflatable cocoons, decaying ephemera—a world still performing its upkeep long after the system it served has collapsed.
About the filmmaker
Jenkin van Zyl is an artist and filmmaker based in London whose multidisciplinary practice spans film, performance, writing, and sculpture, combining these forms into hallucinatory, immersive installations—often centred on film—that conjure fantastical communities inhabiting transient worlds, from ghouls breeding cakes in aircraft cabins to inflatable beasts in desert fortresses or rats writhing in love hotels.
Beyond the screen, these protagonists and their environments persist as material “escapees” in the form of sculptures and objects that permeate van Zyl’s wider oeuvre.
Born in 1993, van Zyl graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2021, where he received the RA Gold Medal Prize, and has since presented work in exhibitions including Lost Property at ARoS, Aarhus (2025); Yay, to have a mouth! at Rose Easton and Ginny on Frederick, London (2025); Transmediale at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin (2024); Dance of the Sleepwalkers at Edel Assanti, London (2024); Surrender at FACT Liverpool (2023) and Edel Assanti, London (2023); The Horror Show! at Somerset House, London (2022); Barbe à Papa at CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux (2022); Machines of Love at Tramway, Glasgow (2021); Hors Pistes at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); Kiss My Genders at Hayward Gallery, London (2019); and Oblivion Industry at The Horse Hospital, London (2019).