Wolfgang Tillmans transforms the Centre Pompidou's library in Paris into a sweeping, poetic study of photography, knowledge, and utopia on the eve of the museum's five-year closure.
When Wolfgang Tillmans was first invited to take over 6,000 square metres of the Centre Pompidou’s public library floor, it was not a traditional exhibition space he was offered—but a vast, wall-less expanse rich with architectural and philosophical meaning. Now, as the Pompidou prepares for a five-year closure, Tillmans has transformed its Bibliothèque Publique d'Information (BPI) into a sprawling meditation on image-making, information, and collective memory. Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us is both a retrospective and a radical curatorial experiment—one that reflects nearly four decades of the German artist’s visual thinking.
Tillmans resists linear narratives and categorisation, favouring instead an open constellation of photographic genres: portraits, abstractions, still lifes, and documentary scenes cohabitate fluidly across horizontal tables and vertical panels. The exhibition includes moving images, sound, and texts, activating the BPI not as a neutral container but as an interlocutor. “I haven’t tried to emulate the library system of classification,” Tillmans notes, “but my love for books and paper is present throughout.” The result is a porous and poetic dialogue between architecture, knowledge, and presence.
This temporary transformation of the BPI marks more than a grand farewell to the Pompidou—it probes the very structure of how we organise knowledge and inhabit public space. In an age of digital oversaturation and AI-generated imagery, Tillmans' analog methods—carefully composed still lifes, low-fi photocopies, and installations of entire books—assert a quiet confidence in the photographic image as a record of real sensation. His work seeks not to dazzle with spectacle, but to sharpen our powers of observation.
The show is deeply personal. From early zine-like spreads to monumental works like Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast, Tillmans’ career is recounted not as a chronological progression, but as a series of lived, embodied moments. One room includes an invitation to use functioning photocopiers—both a homage to the BPI’s working past and to Tillmans’ ongoing interest in the machinery of reproduction. Elsewhere, a video installation captures students studying in the library during a special opening, turning the viewer into a witness of everyday utopias.
This monumental exhibition also acknowledges its own precarious moment. France, like much of Europe, stands at a political crossroads; the Pompidou’s closure is itself symbolic of a broader institutional shift. The show’s title encapsulates this duality—poised between preparedness and uncertainty, rooted in the past but reaching forward. By staging books in their entirety, repurposing forgotten shelves, and allowing the worn carpet to reveal the library’s previous configurations, Tillmans evokes a photographic negative of a place undergoing transformation.
Though unavoidably political—Tillmans has long engaged with LGBTQ+ rights, anti-nationalism, and democratic access—his work remains inclusive, seeking resonance across communities and generations. “I don’t want the show to be nostalgic,” he insists. “Looking at the past can suggest a positive vision of the future.”
