Supersonic Mediaeval: Tilda Swinton unveils the invisible at Christie’s

What if a mirror could hold more than its reflection? At Christie’s Paris, Tilda Swinton signs an exhibition that is deeply poetic and visually intelligent.

When the curator becomes an actress in space

With Supersonic Mediaeval, Christie’s entrusts the reins of its Parisian salons to a duo as unexpected as they are demanding: artist Marianna Kennedy and actress Tilda Swinton, who becomes the exhibition’s resident curator. This is not a classic exhibition, but an immersive mise-en-scène, at once homage and rewriting, where each work seems to await its viewer.

The exhibition – on view until May 11, 2025 – blurs the lines between design, craftsmanship and narrative sculpture. Swinton, a committed collector and close friend of Kennedy, injects her cinematic sensibility into the scenography, transforming the hushed salons of Christie’s into a theater of silent wonder.

Craftsmanship rooted in the present, inspired by the past

From her studio in London’s Spitalfields, Marianna Kennedy has been shaping a tactile universe since 2006: gilded mirrors, plaster lamps, bronze sculptures. She works with materials as noble as resin, always in very limited series, in a logic of ancestral gesture at the service of reinvented design.

Each piece bears the mark of a suspended time, of an almost mystical link between heritage and invention. Kennedy does not seek to reproduce, but to reactivate forgotten knowledge, imbuing his objects with an almost magical aura.

Tilda Swinton, a creative encounter more than just a collaboration

Swinton doesn’t present Kennedy’s works: she tells them, inhabits them. The duo compose an aesthetic score, in which the past is a texture, never a straitjacket.

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