Tilda Swinton: What Awaits at the “Ongoing” Exhibition at Onassis Ready

By Niki-Maria-Koskina

In Ongoing, Tilda Swinton traces a retrospective of her life and artistic journey through the people who have marked it most profoundly, the collaborators whose presence has shaped her path over the years.

Presented at Onassis Stegi’s Onassis Ready space, the exhibition unfolds as an expansive project devoted to pivotal moments in Swinton’s personal, professional and creative life, viewed through the prism of collaboration. The project resonates seamlessly with this year’s anniversary programme at the Stegi, whose thematic focus revolves around the notion of family, not merely as blood relation, but as a chosen community of companions, influences and fellow travellers.

Tilda Swinton: Ongoing, the performance and rooftop film screenings

The exhibition Ongoing centers on photographs, objects and film projections that have marked defining moments in Tilda Swinton’s life and creative trajectory thus far. Structured across eight distinct sections, the exhibition is shaped around the individuals she encountered along the way; artists and companions with whom she forged close collaborations and shared acts of creation. As Swinton herself remarked, the exhibition is inhabited by ghosts: the lingering presences of collaborators, friends and family members. Yet these spectres are neither mournful nor distant. Instead, she folds them into her own narrative, allowing them to become inseparable from her life story and from the path she continues to carve through the world.

The works presented in the exhibition bring together projects by eight longtime artistic collaborators and close friends: Pedro Almodóvar, Luca Guadagnino, Joanna Hogg, Derek Jarman, Jim Jarmusch, Olivier Saillard, Tim Walker and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Through installations, photographs and film projections, visitors are drawn into the atmosphere of the world Tilda Swinton chooses to share, a deeply personal project that underscores the importance collaborations and human encounters have held throughout her life. At its heart lies the act of exchange: the creative energy born from dialogue, companionship and the quiet intensity of making something together. Swinton has long been known for giving both people and artistic ideas the time they require to fully emerge. Some of the projects woven into the exhibition began as conversations or fleeting concepts decades before finally taking shape. There is, throughout Ongoing, a sense of artistic time unfolding slowly and deliberately.

Among the figures inevitably present is Pedro Almodóvar, with whom Swinton has collaborated on two films. His The Human Voice, featured in the exhibition, was released in 2020 during the turbulent months of the Covid pandemic. The film’s heroine appears uncannily tailored to Swinton herself despite the fact that she had no involvement in the writing of the screenplay.

One the exhibition’s most poignant works is 19, created in collaboration with Joanna Hogg. The installation revolves around the reconstruction of the first apartment Tilda Swinton moved into after leaving her family home. As Swinton recalls, it was the apartment she entered as a student and left as the mother of two children. She lived there for fourteen years, and the space has since become inseparable from the memory of an entire era. “We all carry places like this in our minds”, she reflects. “Small, noisy, not particularly clean”. Swinton has known Hogg since the age of eleven, making the collaboration itself an extension of a lifelong connection. Remarkably, when the decision was made to recreate the apartment, no photographs of the original space existed. The reconstruction therefore emerged entirely from memory.

Another compelling chapter of the exhibition is The Maybe, a work charged with grief, vulnerability and profound emotional resonance. For Tilda Swinton, 1994 marked a devastating period: the loss of her longtime collaborator Derek Jarman, along with forty-three other friends and artistic companions to AIDS-related illness. In the wake of those losses, Swinton conceived a performance piece that became both an act of mourning and a deeply human meditation on absence, fragility and exposure. In The Maybe, she placed herself on public display, lying motionless on a bed enclosed within a glass vitrine. Visible to everyone, yet untouchable, she existed in a suspended state, at once intimately present and impossibly distant.

The exhibition closes with Tilda Swinton’s own manifesto for a more radical way of living, a poetic and deeply personal list of reflections, gestures and quiet acts of resistance that distil the spirit of Ongoing. The propositions move fluidly between the philosophical and the practical: make friends with chaos, the first and perhaps most revealing line on the list, sits alongside honour the brightheaded, celebrate silence, read history, open your ears, hold faith in miracles, follow the wind and head for the light. Taken together, the phrases read less like instructions than like fragments of a worldview shaped by curiosity, empathy, artistic freedom and emotional openness.

As part of the exhibition’s parallel programme, the rooftop of Onassis Stegi’s Onassis Ready will host the launch of its summer film screenings. The programme will feature six feature-length films, each introduced by a short film personally selected by Tilda Swinton herself, creating a cinematic dialogue shaped by her distinctive artistic sensibility. The screenings will run from May 25 to June26.