Wolfgang Tillmans Prepares Us for What’s Next

A landmark carte-blanche exhibition covering 35 years of German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’s work opened last week inside a skeletal Centre Pompidou, which is set to close for five years in September for some much-needed rehabilitation. Already, the centre’s Bibliothèque Publique d’Information (Bpi) has been stripped of its endless rows of shelves and tables, leaving ample space for a final show that looks to the future, rather than the Pompidou’s 50-year past. 

In a major shift from the institution’s previous sweeping survey exhibitions (including Surréalisme, which closed this January), Tillmans’s solo show takes exhibiting photography to a monumentalism usually reserved for painting. An expansive show that questions how knowledge is created and shared today, the exhibition heralds what’s to come for the Pompidou’s new programming once it reopens in 2030.

With the library’s collection temporarily relocated, Tillmans was given full liberty to install hundreds of his own photographs, video works and books. Exhibiting works sprawled across 6,000 square meters, it’s both one of the most immense retrospectives of the artist’s work and the Pompidou’s most ambitious photography exhibition to date. The show is aptly titled Nothing could have prepared us, Everything could have prepared us. Not even a lifetime as a digital native could prepare someone for the consumption of such a considerable amount of work in one viewing. A highly anticipated exhibition, the visitor counter ticked past 1,343 midway through opening night, and crowds of visitors swarming across level two evoked scenes from the film Koyaanisqatsi (1982).

Designed to democratize access to information during the 1970s, today the Bpi is still revered as a freely available and constantly updated reserve of knowledge. Leaving the space mostly ‘as-is,’ Tillmans draws a neat analogy between the library’s cultural status as a place of transmission and his own photography, generating a dialogue that becomes progressively more overt throughout the show.

Despite being emptied of its collections, the Bpi’s identity remains unwaveringly present. Rectangular imprints of the original purple carpet, which were rediscovered once the bookshelves were removed, act like photograms or negatives of the Bpi’s past. The rest of the carpet retains the common public library hues of grey and green, illuminated by bright fluorescent lighting. Now devoid of its usual rows of books, it is Tillmans’s works which now line the walls. Images of varying sizes, mediums and frames are either tacked up, laid out on tables or rummaged about, as in the Photocopy room, the Bpi’s own Xerox copying room to which Tillmans has added copies of his own works that visitors can scan, print and assemble. The result evokes a sense of endless browsing similar to that which the space once housed. 

As the Bpi was being cleared out, Tillmans’s team had to decide what should stay behind. Along with a few of the shelves, the original computer booths remain, where visitors without home computers surfed the web or tackled online administration. Those same computers now run a series of Tillmans’ video works. While pondering filmed green peas bubbling in boiling water or rats skipping across metro tracks, eyes wander to a sign glued above the computer that reads: “ATTENTION AUX VOLS. Ne laissez jamais vos sacs par terre. Gardez-les devant vous dans votre cabine” (Beware of theft. Never leave your bags on the ground. Keep them in front of you inside your booth), a phrase many students have lazily read and reread while procrastinating. The experience feels remarkably familiar and safe, as the public library is to so many. In keeping with the library spirit and in a Pompidou first, Maision Celine has made possible a series of dates where the exhibition can be visited for free.

Master of showing the startling beauty of banality, Tillmans dots disarming images of everyday life throughout the exhibition. Viewers pause in front of still lifes of nondescript houseplants, beautifully lit breakfast table scenes, receipts and potatoes. There are pictures of tarsiers and mushrooms next to older 1988 photocopy prints, showing Tillmans unabashed range of interests and techniques. The drone of Tillmans’s experimental and ambient music is heard throughout, accompanying the artist’s video works. At the back of the Bpi an enormous LED screen shows Time Flows All Over (version Pompidou) (2025). The artist repeatedly chants, “Language is what it is, we mean what we say.”  

The large, open space lends itself to browsing, indicating that Tillmans does not expect viewers to contemplate absolutely everything. Rather than organising his works chronologically, he follows a thematic approach, allowing viewers to wander the space without following an exhibition path. This layout is truer to the original designs of the Pompidou than the upper exhibition floors tainted by accumulations of later interventions. Viewers seem encouraged to meander, think, sit and watch across this large, open plain – the very purpose of this aging house of contemplation, an approach that reflects the artist’s desire to evoke proximity to the library’s established pursuit of knowledge and social diversity.  

All knowledge is not made equal, however, as Tillmans encourages visitors to consider the limits and parameters of image-based information. At the center of the first area of the exhibition, Truth Study Centre (2005-ongoing) explores the damaging false proclamations that are often weaponized against our freedoms. Tables with photocopied print and online media, texts, ephemera and photographs from the past foreshadow current events, suggesting the media and imagery’s participation in the creation and dissemination of meaning. 

Camera-less and experimental photography make up an important part of Tillman’s œuvre. A series of large camera-less prints made with expired developing chemicals titled Silver (1992-ongoing) is displayed across from a library shelf left in-situ, the prints’ colours mirroring book spines. Freischwimmer and Greifbar (2003) are drawings Tillmans makes in the darkroom with hand-held light sources. Dispersed throughout the show, these haunting images are unsettling because, despite their lack of recognisable form, our minds still perceive them as photographs. It appears as if the artist has documented another world that exists but is not usually perceived. 

 The artist’s most captivating work, however, remains his photographs of people in embrace or dance. They act as records of personal intimacy and friendship, or as pure collective documents of a moment in time, reducing a vast range of experiences to isolated moments. This kaleidoscopic and monumental view of photographs which, afterall, are of moments in the past, paradoxically calls forth an acute awareness of being alive today, making the show feel remarkably of our time. The influx of recording devices into daily life has created a perpetual state of living with and repeating the past, a realization labeled Hauntology by the late writer and critic Mark Fisher. For staggering proof of this, consider Tillmans’s 1990s rave scenes, at once contemporary and nostalgic.

Taking the show as a commentary of our post-digital landscape where a world mediated by online images has caused serious fatigue,  its engagement in image-saturation complexifies its message.

Tillmans has a response, however, to the idea that images are damaging our relationship to direct experience. In a series of recordings accompanying the exhibition, he recognises that living in the immaterial moment is true spiritual practice. According to Tillmans, spirituality is not at odds with taking pictures. He states that a photograph’s unique suspension of a moment in time, and the information it holds, contain a complete openness akin to transcendence. Tillmans compiles his reflections on the subject in one of the vitrines of the Tables section towards the far end of the Bpi entitled Spirituality BPI table (2025). An edition of Aperture magazine which he curated is open to an essay by David Campany, who also comments on the ineffable in photography. 

Tillmans’s all-encompassing exhibition is post digital in its cascading reflection of overconsumption, neoliberal identity and our image-saturated world, and utterly analog in its approach to human feeling and curiosity. Seemingly banal images of postmodernity are made remarkable within the artist’s aesthetic universe. Across this immense space, once dedicated to democratized knowledge, all hierarchies of subject and medium are removed, and viewers are encouraged to confront what the world truly feels and looks like today: oddity, banality and beauty abound.

Nothing could have prepared us, Everything could have prepared us, is currently on view at the Centre Pompidou until September 22, 2025.