TILDA SWINTON’S ONGOING

words by MAREK BARTEK

From 28 September 2025 until 8 February 2026, EYE FILMMUSEUM is staging Tilda Swinton: Ongoing, an unconventional exhibition dedicated to the Scottish performer. Unlike any previous exhibition at Eye, this isn’t a typical retrospective or “the greatest hits” told through film stills and costumes, nor is it a neatly packaged biography. Instead, it’s a journey through her friendships, collaborations and artistic endeavours. It is a celebration of what it means to create together.

Tilda Swinton with Olivier Saillard and Gaël Mamine working on A Biographical Wardrobe performance, Scotland, 2024.
photography by Ruediger Glatz
courtesy of Olivier Saillard and Tilda Swinton © Ruediger Glatz 

The word “ongoing” in the title says it all. TILDA SWINTON is not looking back with finality. She is looking sideways and forward, pulling us into a continuum of works and relationships that are still alive, still in motion. The exhibition charts over 40 years of cinema and performance, condensed not as memory but as conversation. And if there’s one thing Swinton has always made clear, it’s that she doesn’t exist in isolation. She is a collaborator first, a performer second.

Walking into Eye, there isn’t a singular, overarching narrative, rather, eight different worlds, each shaped by one of her closest collaborators. LUCA GUADAGNINO, whose collaboration with Swinton dates back to The Protagonists (1999), has created both a new short film and a sculpture. These two works read almost like love letters to Swinton, crafted in the medium he knows best — but also in a surprising new form. Director JOANNA HOGG, who has known Swinton since childhood, has reconstructed Flat 19, her London apartment from the 1980s. The multimedia installation feels like opening a time capsule, showing how personal space can become an archive of creative becoming.

stills from Joanna Hogg’s Flat 19, 2025.
commissioned by Eye Filmmuseum, co-produced by Onassis Stegi.
© Joanna Hogg

JIM JARMUSCH has decided to rework his 2019 zombie satire, The Dead Don’t Die. Instead of simply replaying the film, he has transformed it with a new edit, new visuals and a new soundtrack. It’s a reminder of how cinema can be elastic; how a performance doesn’t have to be locked in the past. And with fashion historian OLIVIER SAILLARD, Swinton is staging a multi-day live performance, slipping into garments from her own archive: film costumes, red carpet gowns and family heirlooms. Here, fashion turns memory into present experience.

still from Jim Jarmusch’s Zelda Winston, 2018/2025.
commissioned by Eye Filmmuseum, co-produced by Onassis Stegi.
courtesy of Kill The Head Inc. & Focus Features © Jim Jarmusch

Photographer TIM WALKER and filmmaker APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL have both paid a visit to Swinton’s Scottish home, but each has experienced it through a very different lens. Walker’s photography becomes a dreamlike portrait of lineage and landscape, while Apichatpong creates a more spiritual, meditative installation, where the presence of ancestors almost seems to hover in the air. PEDRO ALMODÓVAR has contributed The Human Voice (2020), a filmic monologue with Swinton, shown here for the first time as a video installation. And finally, the memory of the late DEREK JARMAN stays alive through a video installation of The Last of England (1987), alongside unseen Super 8 footage and personal items. It is an emotional reminder that Swinton’s relationship with Jarman was not only artistic but almost familial.

Stills from Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s double-channel video installation Phantoms, 2025. 
Commissioned by Eye Filmmuseum, co-produced by Onassis Stegi.
© Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Kick the Machine

The final result is a constellation. Each of the dedicated sections feels like a fragment of her creative orbit, and together they show how Swinton’s practice has always been about fellowship. Moving through the exhibition, one thing becomes abundantly clear: her so-called chameleon quality isn’t about disappearing into characters; it’s about opening herself fully to others and giving their visions space to thrive.

Tilda Swinton on the set of The Human Voice, dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2020.
photography by Iglesias Mas, © El Deseo D.A. S.L.U.

Parallel to the installations is a film programme of more than 40 titles. It features a mix of cult oddities, sci-fi, family films and early collaborations with Jarman and Hogg, showcasing Swinton as both actor and muse. Her early work with Jarman is fierce, political and experimental. It stands in sharp juxtaposition to Hogg’s later meditations on memory and intimacy. But both filmmakers allow us to see Swinton for who she really is: a performer who is less concerned with career trajectory than with the ongoing texture of creative relationships.

But Ongoing extends further than the galleries and screenings. It offers a line-up of live conversations and performances, each staged with one of her collaborators. Swinton and her guests discuss their shared works, views on art and memories they’ve made along the way. Perhaps most moving of all, she takes part in a remembrance of Jarman, accompanied by a live performance of one of his last works, Bliss #2. With all these events recorded and made available online, the exhibition’s life extends far beyond Amsterdam, and rightfully so.

stills from Derek Jarman’s Timeslip, 1988/2025.
commissioned by Eye Filmmuseum, co-produced by Onassis Stegi.
images courtesy of James Mackay © Basilisk Communications Limited

What makes this project so striking is the way it reframes the role of the performer. Traditionally, exhibitions about cinema revolve around directors and auteurs, or the myth of the solitary genius. Eye’s choice to dedicate its galleries to Swinton says: the actor is not just an interpreter but a co-author, a catalyst, sometimes even the initiator of the work. Swinton’s presence is not passive but generative — her career is proof that art is not born in isolation.

Eye Filmmuseum has long built its reputation on exhibitions that bridge cinema and the visual arts, and Ongoing pushes that mission further. In Swinton, the museum has found a figure who effortlessly crosses categories of cinema, performance, installation and fashion. She is not simply a director, visual artist or fashion muse, but somehow all of these at once. Ongoing is the first exhibition of its kind at Eye, placing the performer at the centre.

By the time you leave, you don’t feel as though you’ve “seen” Tilda Swinton. Instead, you feel like you’ve stepped inside her web of friendships, memories and artworks — all still unfolding. Some works are playful, others are deeply haunting, but none of them feel like endings. And that, perhaps, is the exhibition’s greatest success. It doesn’t fossilise Swinton as a legend. It keeps her alive, ongoing, exactly as she has always been: in between, in relation, in conversation.