The Dutch far-right personality Sid Lukkassen and the French novelist Michel Houellebecq have a lot in common. Both have publicly bemoaned the fate of unattractive men in the ‘sexual marketplace’. Both have written novels pondering a jihadist takeover of their respective countries. Both have found themselves appearing in, and then distancing themselves from, pornographic films, with a woman who taunts their inadequacies in the name of artistic provocation. That woman is Jini van Rooijen.
Jini van Rooijen is an OnlyFans model and a member of the experimental Dutch art collective KIRAC. She fell in with KIRAC out of dissatisfaction with her studies at the University of Amsterdam. ‘The aesthetics course I followed was incredibly boring. No connection to real life or adventure or sex,’ she tells me, over cigarettes, at the end of a brief layover in London. ‘It all has to be very cold and very stuck up.’
KIRAC, which stands for Keeping It Real Art Critics, is a riposte to the stultified world van Rooijen describes. The group first made their name with essayistic vlogs published on YouTube, in which they opened fire on the art world, confronting the conformists they viewed as its villains. In their own words, they look to ‘occupy the middle ground between art and art criticism’, charging the art establishment with mediocrity and narcissism wherever they see fit.
As she rejected university life, van Rooijen was drawn to KIRAC’s anarchic, iconoclastic spirit – a process that sped up dramatically after she was ‘cancelled’ on campus for ‘sexually traumatising’ a boy she slept with and later spurned. Recounting this, she smirks, saying that the boy in question later recanted his allegations. ‘He told me I’d denied his manliness so much that he got angry at me and just wanted me away.’
This experience found its way into one of the group’s latest films, KIRAC24: Under a Sinking Sun. The episode sees the KIRAC founders recruit ‘cancelled’ but unrepentant college students to participate in a public show. The group then takes the students to a Belgian art college that had once shown slight hesitation in hosting members of KIRAC. Dutifully, the collective took to shocking the Belgians by attacking the timidity of their work, before the coup de grace, where van Rooijen would have sex in front of a full auditorium of art students and KIRAC’s blinking camera.
This was not her first time cavorting in the name of KIRAC. She had made her debut in the episode prior, KIRAC23: Honeypot, which sounds exactly like what it was. In Honeypot, van Rooijen has sex with an ‘ordinary road worker’ and voter for the PVV, the Netherlands’ most prominent far-right party. She also agrees to have sex with Sid Lukkassen, before reneging moments before the act, leaving him naked and humiliated on camera – a move that was a major blow to his career in Dutch far-right politics.
As van Rooijen puts it, Lukkassen replied to her post calling for right-wingers to sleep with, but was ‘just so weird’ when he arrived at her house that she pulled out of the agreement there and then. KIRAC kept rolling regardless, with van Rooijen thinking that if he ‘behaved stupidly… maybe something else would happen’. And so, the film ends with group co-founder Kate Sinha comforting a crying Lukkassen over the phone, all the while reiterating to him that the film will still be released.
Honeypot is awkward, poignant and, at points, undeniably hilarious. As with all of KIRAC’s films, one can never be quite sure where they stand. It’s clear that everyone in the film is playing some sort of character, but it’s hard to discern where reality ends and art begins. After my first watch, I thought Lukkassen was in on it.
