“To produce work with your friends is the best"

“It is all about process,” says British performer Tilda Swinton describing her exhibition Tilda Swinton – Ongoing as we stand in a low-lit hangar of Onassis Ready, a former plastics factory in Athens, Greece, which opened last year as a mecca of art. Beside us is a display cabinet containing ephemera: Polaroids, an old copy of Sight and Sound magazine, an antique hand mirror. Before us, a giant film screen pierces the darkness. A young flamed-haired Swinton is seen in a field of bluebells. The film cuts to the eye of a crow and a bleaker vista: a lonely black cottage with yellow window frames. Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage. 

The show, which runs until 28 June, is Swinton’s “living autobiography”, produced in collaboration with the 65-year-old artist’s auteur friends – people who have become central to her creative process: the late Jarman, Joanna Hogg, Luca Guadagnino, Jim Jarmusch, Pedro Almodóvar, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tim Walker. Swinton is never keen to take the stage alone.

She does, however, perform live in the first four days of the exhibition with the French fashion historian and curator Olivier Saillard in A Biographical Wardrobe. This unfolds through a series of “conversations” in which the pair explore clothing as a physical, emotional archive, preserving memories of the people who wore them. 

One-by-one, garments owned by the actress and members of her family are drawn from white cloth bags, sparking discussion. A short black velvet dress takes Swinton back to the '80s and '90s when actors purchased their own outfits for the red carpet. She wore it to the premiere of Edward II in 1991 and Orlando the following year. “I love the fact that I chose velvet because it reminds me of my mother’s velvet dress,” she says walking over to a long '70s-style gown with purple cuffs hanging on a giant rail. 

She grabs another one-armed-black velvet dress from the selection. “This was made when Alber Elbaz offered to dress me. I told him two things: I do not want to draw attention to myself and I do not want to wear velvet…”  the crowd erupts into laughter as the late fashion designer clearly ignored her wishes. There are other garments: a scarlet military jacket worn by her father, Major-General Sir John Swinton of Kimmerghame, which was always referred to as “pink” not red, and her grandfather’s huge wool coat that he wore during the First World War. Poignant moments follow: Swinton wraps the wool coat around her as if being embraced by her grandfather and draws the cuff of her mother Judith’s dress to her face, drinking in her scent.

“We all start in a net of friends, family and colleges and we make our first work, our first collection, our first film, and it is a collective work,” she says as I join her for a personal tour of the exhibition. “And then we have a little success. We’re told that it is time to graduate from the collective practice to the solo, and this is a crisis for a lot of young artists. I am witness to 40 years of working this way, which is made from relationships developed over decades.”

We step closer to the giant film screen. “This show includes new work by Derek Jarman.” she continues. “He died in 1994 but I found two pieces of new work, Super 8 scraps, out-takes, that were never used in any of the films.” She looks up at the screen, her face bathed in its light, her cropped, swept-back hair and eyebrows platinum white. “It was on this day, when we filmed in the bluebell wood, that we found Prospect Cottage. He’s here, you can see his shadow dancing, his presence is in the frame. This show is so much about spirits, and to a certain extent ghosts. I love that he is here with us.”

She reflects on her younger self. “This is a very shy young person, growing in confidence in front of the camera – a camera which is held by someone she is very close to and trusts. It’s about the relationship." As is so much of this exhibition – with each installation, conceived by Swinton and her friends, you see a woman evolving as a person and in her craft.

This is evident as Swinton draws attention to another monolithic screen in the space, which broadcasts The Last of England (1987), an arthouse Jarman film blending Super 8 home movies, documentary footage, and stylised performances. Swinton dominates the screen, violently ripping at her bridal gown in a frenzied dance. It is mesmerising – and the dress made by another long-term friend and collaborator, costume designer Sandy Powell.

“It was two years of going through all my drawers, all my things, and trying to find the seeds," she says of how the exhibition was put together. We step back to the display case and she places her hand on the glass-top. “These are childhood photographs of Derek and a photograph of us in New York in the '80s,” she continues. “And this is a present he gave me – a rather beautiful antique mirror with an inscription: I went in search of myself. Tilda. Love Derek, written in his hand.” 

I ask her if this show is essentially about people at its heart. She nods. “To produce work with your friends is the best. The first person I actually worked with was Joanna Hogg, who has also collaborated on this show,” she explains. “I worked with her on her graduation film when we were 20. She and I were at school together. I met her when I was 10 and she was 11, and we are still working together.” 

Hogg, the British film director and screenwriter, collaborated with Swinton to create Flat 19, an immersive, multimedia reconstruction of Swinton’s '80s London flat where she lived for some 14 years. During that time, Swinton began working with Jarman but also started a family – giving birth to her now grown twins, Honor and Xavier. One walks through the door, and steps into a magnolia hallway with a grotty cream carpet and chipwood wallpaper. A series of doors are left ajar – and, as one draws closer, Swinton’s voice is heard on a loop recounting memories of times spent in each room. 

Hogg collaborated with Swinton on the films The Souvenir, The Souvenir Part II and The Eternal Daughter – their stories closely informed by their lives. “I came to this flat in 1984 when I left University and I left it in 1998. It’s a chrysalis,” she reflects. “When I arrived in London, I knew I wanted to find a way of artistic practice but didn’t know how that might manifest. It is full of stories.”

We move on to film director Luca Guadagnino’s contribution: a bust of Swinton’s head and shoulders (“It was entirely his idea; it’s plated in silver on an oak plinth”) inside a box-like room and a small film screen in an adjoining space (“He made this film on his phone in the same spirit as the Super 8 films of Derek Jarman; a little home movie at Luca’s home in Italy.”)

In Guadagnino’s film Swinton wears a red Raf Simons’ sweatshirt, which we had been introduced to earlier in the live performance. She had read out the names printed in black on the front of the sweatshirt: independence, faith, worship, determination, resistance… the list goes on. “They are words that are very important to me,” Swinton says.

I note that Guadagnino is also a serial collaborator. Swinton agrees: “Something that I love about this exhibition is the way all these people have a web themselves,” she says. “So Derek Jarman knew Joanna Hogg and he was an early influence on her and Luca Guadagnino. I met Luca about two months after Derek died at a Jarman symposium at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. Everybody dovetails.”

We enter a second hanger-like hall, where a blinking screen shows the movie The Dead Don't Die, Swinton’s 2019 zombie comedy film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. Here, however, it is a twin-screen installation, or “distillation” as Swinton calls it. She sums up her part in the film as “a Scottish Samurai sword wielding funeral director who at the end of the film goes up in a spaceship!” 

In the corner of the space is a bed in a glass box – the same piece she has slept in on a number of occasions for the exhibition The Maybe, originally conceived in collaboration with artist Cornelia Parker, which debuted at London’s Serpentine in 1995 and has since been reprised in Rome and New York. “In 1993 when Derek Jarman died, I was 33 and went to 43 funerals of friends who had died of AIDS,” she explains. “I not only lost a friend but felt like my way of working was completely over. I was not an actor, I wasn’t interested in working in the theatre or industrial cinema,” she says as we gaze into the glass box. “So I had this idea of a hybrid gesture combining the scrutiny of the cinema, which I do love, with what I like about live performance, which is being in the same space as a body in real time. It also relates to my experience of sitting at the bedsides of my dear friends who were dying, and thinking how wonderful it would be to sit next to a healthy body – I would just wait for them to wake up.” 

She points to footage by her friend Jacqueline Lucas Palmer taken at the Serpentine exhibition. “It's a sleeping piece. At the Serpentine I slept for eight hours a day. At MoMA, the show was unannounced. I just popped up. People tell me I’m still there. Someone saw me there last week,” she laughs. “I would like to do it again. I will do it until I’m 100.”

In another corner of the hangar is a gallery of images by the fashion photographer Tim Walker. “I have a very close and ongoing relationship with him. He’s known as a fashion photographer but beyond that he’s a great portraitist. There are many portraits of my own family, so I commissioned him to make some of me at my childhood home,” she explains. “One is about me incarnating my ancestors, I’m dressed as them, and another was related to integrating the wardrobe,” she says, gesturing to a large framed print of her wearing Haider Ackermann – pieces she had earlier shown to the audience in A Biological Wardrobe. There is a clear evolution in the images. The shy girl in Jarman’s bluebell wood is replaced by the strong, independent creative force she is today.