Jenkin van Zyl couldn’t have predicted that the debut of his new film installation would coincide with a news cycle awash with stories of escaped AI agents, but it certainly does make it uncannily topical. Enclosure, due to open at Somerset House Studios this Thursday (Sept 24), follows a former starlet, Mercy, as she returns to an abandoned fairground-slash-laboratory where she once agreed to have her likeness duplicated, planning to terminate her now-obsolete double. 

Van Zyl has spent a decade making moving image work, although Enclosure is his first scripted piece. A graduate of the prestigious RA Schools program, he has returned again and again to bodily extremes, marrying gore and fetish in immersive installations that extend beyond the screen. Often his characters are dressed in ornate outfits, mirroring van Zyl’s own elaborate self-presentation, which he tells Dazed is more for himself than an extension of his image-making practice. 

Enclosure isn’t van Zyl’s first foray into doppelgangers and doubles. His 2025 film Lost Property showed three characters searching for their counterparts, climaxing in a scene where one character consumes their doppelganger. For him, the figure of the double is “like an encounter with the self in some way. It’s a way to interrogate what it means to be a sovereign, fixed person, and how to complicate that”. 

The abandoned site depicted in Enclosure is sparsely populated, with remnants of the facility’s heyday scattered throughout the film and carried into the installation. It’s shot across two locations, an abandoned polytechnic and a set of Cold War-era bunkers. In previous films, van Zyl used guerrilla filmmaking to access these now-obsolete spaces, but now he’s using them legitimately. Still, he points out, “Even now that we have permission to shoot in places, and it’s very safe and done properly, there is still this sense of mischief or trespassing”. 

Van Zyl approaches this sobering subject material playfully. Very real concerns about the effects of technological acceleration were central to the development of Enclosure. “I’m interested in what it means to look at decay and erosion as a way to have fun within the ruins as well,” he says. “I think that’s where the humour comes in too, because that gives you a sense of agency”. 

Rather than creating a hyper-modern aesthetic, van Zyl leaned into the anachronistic feeling that the setting created. The rub between past and present is personified in the performance of van Zyl’s longtime collaborator Agnieszka Szczotka, who acts as a hostess and guide through the facility. “We wanted to use her to track the decay of the facility, and so she begins as a hysterical influencer-type character … but then decays into this almost ahistorical, anachronistic, strange, Victorian-cum-gothical set of figures.” 

Sourced and fabricated set pieces and stop-motion animation give every frame of Enclosure a tactile feel. Nando Messias, who plays Mercy, has training in Butoh, an avant-garde Japanese dance form that explores taboos through carefully controlled movement. This texture makes the only generated aspect of the work even more uncanny: the face of Mercy’s Cherub, doubled via deepfake technology. 

“Everything is real, but there’s deepfaking that is used to replicate the lead character as the Cherub, so there is an engagement with a technology that I don’t think should exist. For me, there is no value in that existing in the world, and I think it’s deeply evil and frightening, but I wanted to use it as an embodied thing within the film to talk quite literally about the idea of consent and replication.” 

Discussing how this process has begun to be enacted in real life, van Zyl recalls how Liza Minnelli recently gave consent for the voice of her mother, Judy Garland, to be used by an AI company. “You can now licence her voice to read your children’s stories, or companies can potentially use it as a voiceover or a chatbot. Obviously I love Judy Garland, but she’s also a woman who was so needlessly and endlessly exploited in her lifetime. And so the idea of being exploited even beyond, in her death, is something that became a core way to think about the narrative of this film.”  

This tension between exploitation and agency hangs over the final frames of the film. Mercy’s Cherub is left as an intentionally ambiguous figure: terrifying but also sympathetic. “I think I wanted that to be slippery in itself. We don’t really know whether she’s a direct, sovereign copy of Mercy … is she her own autonomous human being, or is she just a cypher?” Rather than making a didactic statement, van Zyl allows his subjects to remain weird, ambiguous, and alluring. 

Enclosure runs at Somerset House Studios, London, from 24 September to 29 November 2026, and forms part of its tenth anniversary celebrations.