British actress Tilda Swinton has regaled audiences around the world on stage, screen, and via other mediums for over 40 years. Now her life and career are the subject of “Ongoing”, a new exhibition that debuted at Amsterdam’s Eye Film Museum on Monday.

Those looking for more than a few passing references to her Hollywood blockbusters are bound to go home disappointed, though.

“Ongoing” runs now through February 8 2026 and it isn’t the sort of show that features costumes or props from her sojourns into the cinematic worlds of Marvel and Narnia. Instead it focuses on live appearances and recent collaborations as well as more obscure items from her past.

“When I was first approached to do this show, I have to confess I was very hesitant, hesitant to the point of saying ‘no’ for a couple of years,” Swinton told reporters in Amsterdam.

“I think this was a failure of imagination. I had this horror of something retrospective and finished and somehow dead. I had an idea of clips of old films, old posters, old pictures, and mannequins with old costumes and I just could not bear the thought,”

Ongoing 

About five years have passed since then and Swinton gradually changed her mind. “I started to reflect and wondered about what use the show I could create could be to anybody,” Swinton recalled. “That was really the starting point. It had to be of some use. What could I offer? What am I for?”

The efforts of both herself and her collaborators from the Eye and the worlds of art, fashion, and film eventually yielded an exhibition that, to quote the title, is ongoing, rather than a retrospective.

“The title of this project, ‘Ongoing’, doesn’t just mean that we will keep evolving and changing toward the future, it also means that all ideas in cinema come from somewhere,” said the museum’s director, Bregtje van der Haak.

Collaborations and remixes of projects with some of Swinton’s contemporaries, among them film directors Pedro Almodóvar and Jim Jarmusch, fill the exhibit’s screens. Images of her dressed as ethereal characters and other figures line the walls.

Photographer Tim Walker visited Swinton at her home in Scotland to work on a series focused on her forebears. Among the shots is one of her dressed as a family member who fought in World War 1.

Instead of her costumes from Avengers: Endgame or her various appearances in Wes Anderson films, a line of outfits from a variety of events and smaller projects hang from a simple wire on coat hangers.

“This project is not a retrospective, it’s a living constellation of her ideas, her films, her friendships, and her memories,” Van der Haak said. “For the participants, but also for visitors, it’s an invitation to step into a process; open, evolving, and very much ongoing. It celebrates the joy of making films.”

This is the first time the Eye has worked with an entertainer on this level and the exhibition has debuted at the museum. After February, the plan is to have it tour the world.

Stepping into the past

Despite the incorporation of live events and recent works, Swinton did admit the exhibit is still “full of phantoms”.

One such spirit is the artist and activist Derek Jarman, one of her first and most favourite collaborators, who passed away in 1994 from an AIDS-related illness. ‘Ongoing’ includes The Maybe, a glass case Swinton locked herself in during a series of performance art events in the 1990s to help draw attention to the crisis and pay tribute to Jarman and others who succumbed to complications from the disease.

There’s also Flat 19, a new work and arguably the centrepiece of “Ongoing”. It’s a full-scale recreation of a London apartment she lived in during the early days of her career and as she expanded into feature films. Visitors can sit in the living room, look out the windows, and pass by various rooms as recordings of Swinton share memories of the years she spent there.

“I have nothing to lose and nothing to hide,” Swinton said. “Make of it what you will. I’m not nervous. I was up until yesterday when something hadn’t arrived, but now I’m relieved and very proud and am really interested in what people make of it.”

Find out more about the exhibition and accompanying events.