ONGOING: TILDA SWINTON

TILDA SWINTON’S LATEST EXHIBITION IS AN ODE TO ARTISTIC COLLABORATION, AS SHE INTERROGATES HER WARDROBE WITH THE ALAÏA FOUNDATION’S OLIVIER SAILLARD.

By Kasia Maciejowska

Standing in the newly-opened second iteration of her exhibition Ongoing, Tilda Swinton recalls the days when the film and fashion industries were two separate universes. InOnassis Ready in Athens, Greece (this is the space's sophomore show, co-produced by Onassis Stegi and Vasiliki Vasilatou) she is surrounded by installations featuring herself through the lenses of her dearest collaborators, from Joanna Hogg and Derek Jarman, who co-created her earliest expressions, to more recent partnerships with Tim Walker, Pedro Almodóvar, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Luca Guadagnino, Jim Jarmusch, and the painter Sandro Kopp. “When you were launching a film, when I started out, you would just wear your own dress to the premiere, and it was probably a dress you also wore to your birthday party or a film premiere you’d attended the year before.”

She’s riffing on the theme of the red carpet, and how walking it for promotional purposes has become a “task” one is expected to perform. Not that she doesn’t like it, as her shattering excellence at performance’s broad sweep takes it naturally in its stride—but she describes its challenges, and her tricks for confronting them, to her friend Olivier Saillard, fashion historian and Alaïa Foundation director with whom she’s co-created A Biographical Wardrobe. In this performance, they talk through, and sometimes act out, a selection of pieces from Tilda’s personal clothing collection, using it to tell stories about some of the people and memories that have shaped her life. She instructs Olivier: “Don’t speak, or there will be a picture of you with your mouth open. Smiling is risky too. And I like wearing heels, because it keeps me awake.”

For this dialogue, Tilda plays herself, unscripted, with the winning kind of charm that balances vulnerability and poise. During our shoot, over the exhibition’s opening week, she shows up with the collaborative spirit she often speaks fondly of, engaging continuously with the photographer and thoroughly with my interview questions, enthusing generously over ideas around love and deftly mentioning her hesitations when needed.

For the first shot, photographer Bill Georgoussis wants her in conversation with Olivier, locating the pair in the installation’s recreation of Tilda’s first flat in London, which served as a chrysalis for the emergence of her artistic career and those of many around her. As they sit in the mock window frame, she flips the focus and asks Olivier about his first flat, swiftly escalating the exchange with gentle psychoanalytic prompts. As Bill gets the shot, she jokes, “Sorry—we’re busy having a psychiatric conversation here.”

Later on, as we move to video, Tilda waves her hands and arms as directed, elegantly throwing shapes onto the screen beaming out Derek Jarman’s Super 8 from many moons ago. The projection of her long-haired younger self falls over the architectural shape of her today. Tilda talks about late companions and how she experiences their presence now; everyone in the room is devastated by the instant casual poetry and visual metaphor of the orchestrated moment.

Tilda is never not composed, yet she is also naked enough that every interaction on set cultivates connection. Talking to her, it is impossible not to feel that she is extremely, extraordinarily alive. Judging by the reactions of everyone she worked on the exhibition with, and the near-universal gushing that follows any mention of her name, she seems to make everyone else feel more alive, too. Relating is clearly her lifeblood, as the focus of her biographical exhibition and book could have easily been solo-centric. Instead, she opted to map out what she calls the many “trees” that form the forest of her artistic life.

When asked about how she cultivates so many loving and fruitful relationships: “That atmosphere of shared trust and complicity and company… I’m very lucky to have discovered that so early in my life, because it’s my drug of choice. I got hooked on it nice and early, and I’m not willing to give it up. So I do look for it, and fortunately find it. I think if you know it, you know what to look for, and you also know what not to waste your time on.”

At the end of each fragment of wall text in the exhibition, there’s the phrase: “So-and-so (Olivier Saillard, Tim Walker, etc.) and Tilda Swinton are developing ongoing projects…” It’s a sort of refrain; protection against the show being considered only a retrospective. Correspondingly, she explains that her enigmatic choice to use an image of the back of her head for the cover of Ongoing’s exhibition book was, in part, due to the fact that it depicts her looking forward.

Many of the films Tilda has co-authored have emerged from years of discussions with directors, and similarly, she produced Ongoing after long deliberation and development. A force in mid-flow, we can only wait to see what fresh forms her new waves might take, certainly envisioned alongside her nearest and dearest from across the arts, and luminous like the burning flame she is.