Wolfgang Tillmans’ Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us

Tout nous y préparait (Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us) at the Centre Pompidou, an eloquent installation that defies standard exhibition logic. It is immersive in every sense: spatially, emotionally, politically. Tilting the library’s bones into narrative, Tillmans invites us to linger, to connect fragments, and to grieve—and hope. This is a show that doesn’t just reward viewing— it insists on feeling.

© Wolfgang Tillmans

Stepping into the Wolfgang Tillmans’ exhibition is like entering a space caught between memory and erasure. With books and furniture largely removed, the once lively public library becomes a hushed stage. The remaining signs like “Politique”, “Éducation”, and “Philosophie” seem to float in absence, invoking both what was and what might have been. Into this void, Tillmans pours decades of work in a manner that eschews hierarchy. His sprawling photographs—from intimate portraits to pulsating club scenes, from still lives of fruit to abstractions—are pinned, taped, and clipped loosely onto walls and shelves. They cascade in scale, defy order, and refuse to let any one piece dominate.

The exhibition is more than a display—it’s architecture reimagined. Tillmans reconfigures the Centre Pompidou’s public library remnants—empty shelving, purple carpet patches, tables, and even photocopy zones—into presentation tools and symbolic props. The “Autoformation” and reprography spaces, once tools for learning, now echo his “Truth Study Centre” and photocopied works, blurring the lines between practice and pedagogy. By integrating videos, sounds, texts, performances, and archival materials, he overrides the white cube of the gallery with a hybrid sensory environment. It feels both like a museum and a living library—with history written, erased, and rewritten in the same gesture.

This is not a linear retrospective, but a pulse. Works like early portraits of friends, club scenes from the ’90s, and still lifes of everyday objects resonate with the nostalgia of unguarded freedom; they stand beside media critiques, activist posters (e.g., Brexit warnings), and experimental abstractions that speak of eroding truth and surveillance, drawing sharp parallels between the personal and the political. Examples stand in poignant juxtaposition: “Zeitungsjacket” (1985) displayed near a statistics shelf, or photocopy prints of the Pompidou’s facade melting into the library’s own structure—mirroring art’s fluid boundaries with space and meaning.

At its heart, the show feels like an elegy—a farewell to both the Pompidou’s library and a cultural moment. The building’s transformation into this visual archive is a symbolic closure before its five-year renovation. Tillmans collects fragments not to organize, but to echo the chaos of information, the fragility of memory, and the urgency of presence in a digital age. His sprawling installation reminds us—one image at a time—that freedom, once lived, can feel both distant and vital. – Anna Barr