Centre Pompidou and Wolfgang Tillmans: Photography as a Living Archive

The Centre Pompidou is about to close its doors for years of renovation, but not before one last memorable act: Wolfgang Tillmans. Wolfgang Tillmans has taken over almost the entire floor of the former library, turning it into a sprawling installation that looks less like a retrospective and more like a living organism. Forty years of artistic creation unfurl under the enigmatic title “Nothing could have prepared us / Everything could have prepared us” and the result is both disorienting and exhilarating.

As you step into the space the chronology evaporates. This is not a story of progression or career milestones. Tillmans leans into the ghost of the library, weaving his work into its very frame. Photographs cover the walls in constellations, videos, sound, and music bleed into the flow. Original library tables are converted into vitrines holding Tillmans’s vast paper archive: magazines, artist books, graphic design projects, all documenting Tillmann’s diverse editorial practice.

For Tillmans photography is never just a picture on the wall. It’s process, accident, experiment.  Tillmans has long been fascinated by imperfection and chance. In the “Freischwimmer” and “Greifbar” light literally paints across photographic paper, contaminating it into abstraction. The gleam of the “Silver” series comes from an unpredictable chemical reaction of a developer on a photographic paper. His “Lighter” works capture the fold of photographic paper into sculptural forms, collapsing the flat image back into three dimensions. In his “Paper drops” he returns that three-dimensionality to the print itself. These material explorations are exhibited not as detours, but as part of the same vocabulary that includes portraits of friends, still lifes of fruit, posters, and snapshots of life. The spectrum is wide, but the impulse is constant: to test how photography records, resists, and reinvents reality.

One of the exhibition’s great pleasures is its refusal to stick to a single mode of display. Visitors sit, lie down, wander—absorbed into the rhythm of the installation itself. The usual museum ritual of walking, pausing, staring gives way to something more playful, more contemplative.

Elsewhere, the “Truth Study Centre” installations take the opposite approach: dense, layered, restless. Photocopies, screenshots, clippings, and photographs pile up across tables, exposing the fragile mechanisms by which knowledge and misinformation take shape. These works, ongoing since 2005, remind us that images are not neutral, and neither are the structures that deliver them.

If there is a thread tying everything together, it is time itself. Early works from the 1980s hang near brand-new ones from 2025. Objects, places, people, happenstances and abstract forms all appear as fragments of history in the making. Tillmans’s work shows just how fluid the boundary is between the personal and the political, the local and the global.

Technology is folded into this vision as well. For Tillmans, the move from analogue to digital was not the end of photography’s credibility but the beginning of a new chapter. He has embraced high-definition detail, the glitches of screens, even the looming presence of data centers. These works sit easily in dialogue with the Pompidou itself, a building long celebrated as a symbol of a new era, embodying innovation and radical ideas. Both the architecture and the artworks remind us that the digital is never truly immaterial, it is tied to infrastructure, energy and weight.

What makes the exhibition remarkable is how it feels less like a summing-up and more like a new beginning. Restless, open-ended, full of unfinished sentences.Tillmans has always blurred boundaries: between the personal and the collective, between abstraction and representation, between the intimacy of a snapshot and the monumentality of installation. His work is political without slogans, emotional without sentimentality, experimental without losing touch with the world.

As a farewell to the Centre Pompidou before its long renovation, the choice of Tillmans feels right. His exhibition is not about nostalgia; it is about transformation, about the constant reworking of form, space, and meaning. It captures the contradictions of living in the present with one eye on history and the other on what comes next.

This exhibition is a reminder that Tillmans has not only redefined photography—he has redefined how photography can be seen, felt and lived. And as the Pompidou closes its doors, it leaves behind a final image: not an ending, but an opening.