TILDA SWINTON HAS CURATED AN EXHIBITION THEMED ON VIRGINIA WOOLF’S ORLANDO

Belle Hutton, Another, May 28, 2019

In 1992, Tilda Swinton played the titular character in Sally Potter’s film Orlando, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel of the same name. In Woolf’s seminal book, Orlando, born a man in Elizabethan times, was a poet who wakes one day in his thirties to find he has become a woman, and lives without ageing for a further 300 years (the novel ends in 1928, while Potter’s film shows Orlando’s life until the 1990s). 27 years on, and Swinton is revisiting the story of Orlando, this time in the role of curator and guest-editor of a magazine issueand exhibition from Aperture. For the photography foundation and publisher’s 235th magazine issue, the actor and former AnOther coverstar chose Orlando as its thematic, and invited photographers, writers, authors and filmmakers to reflect on and create work inspired by the story.

“Woolf wrote Orlando in an attitude of celebration of the oscillating nature of existence. She believed the creative mind to be androgynous,” Swinton says. “I have come to see Orlando far less as being about gender than about the flexibility of the fully awake and sensate spirit. This issue of Aperture will be a salute to limitlessness, and a heartfelt celebration of the fully inclusive and expansive vision of life exemplified by the extraordinary artists collected here.”

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