For the summer 2019 issue of Aperture and a coinciding exhibition, guest editor Tilda Swinton draws upon the themes of Virginia Woolf’s prescient 1928 novel Orlando, revolutionary in both form and spirit, to offer original images and writings that celebrate openness, curiosity, and human possibility.
Virginia Woolf’s prescient 1928 novel Orlando tells the story of a young nobleman who, during the era of Queen Elizabeth I, lives for three centuries without aging and mysteriously shifts gender along the way. In 1992, filmmaker Sally Potter released a now-classic adaptation of the book with Tilda Swinton in the starring role as Orlando. Since then, Woolf ’s tale has continued to hold sway over Swinton, who describes the book’s ability “to change like a magic mirror. Where I once assumed it was a book about eternal youth, I now see it as a book about growing up, about learning to live.”
“Woolf wrote Orlando,” Swinton notes, “in an attitude of celebration of the oscillating nature of existence. She believed the creative mind to be androgynous. 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 indetermination and limitlessness, and a heartfelt celebration of the fully inclusive and expansive vision of life exemplified by the extraordinary artists collected here.”
Photographs by Zackary Drucker, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Jamal Nxedlana, Elle Pérez, Walter Pfeiffer, Sally Potter, Viviane Sassen, Collier Schorr, Mickalene Thomas, and Carmen Winant
Orlando: Guest Curated by Tilda Swinton
Until July 11, 2019
Aperture Gallery
547 West 27th Street, 4thfloor
New York, N.Y. 10001
Exhibition
https://aperture.org/exhibition/orlando/
Aperture Magazine 235
https://aperture.org/shop/aperture-235-magazine
