Nothing Could Have Prepared Us / Wolfgang Tillmans

Nothing Could Have Prepared Us

Spotlight on Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris

Nothing Could Have Prepared Us – Everything Could Have Prepared Us tears open Wolfgang Tillmans’ four decades of photographic and multimedia work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. This sprawling exhibition unfolds across nine fractured zones inside a former library, transforming a space built for silent research into a disquieting arena for reflection on political chaos, environmental collapse and the shifting grounds of cultural perception. Tillmans doesn’t offer comfort or easy narratives. Instead, he exposes the raw machinery of image-making — how photographs fracture reality, manipulate belief, and demand confrontation with the unruly present.

Reclaiming a space through an exhibition

Occupying the second floor of the Pompidou, inside what was once a library dedicated to public information, Tillmans reshapes architecture into a terrain of tension. The cavernous, angular space carries the weight of both history and urgent present. Here, silence once ruled; now, images and sounds clash and echo in uneasy harmony. The exhibition spreads out like an assault on the senses, tracking more than forty years of work from the German artist whose lens has never been neutral. Tillmans pulls from political upheavals, cultural shifts and social fractures, weaving a tangled web that refuses to settle. Tillmans treats the space not as a neutral container but as a participant, activating its silent histories through site-specific works and inviting visitors to traverse its spaces with eyes wide open, senses sharp, and assumptions dismantled.Throughout the exhibition, Tillmans refuses easy narratives or closure. His images loop and spiral, caught in cycles of political urgency and personal memory, environmental dread and social critique. He invites viewers to live in the tension between despair and defiance, to confront the fractures that define contemporary existence without seeking false consolation. His work does not comfort — it disrupts, unsettles and challenges. It holds up a fractured mirror to a world unraveling, insisting on the necessity of engagement, awareness, and resistance.

Confronting Violence: The State We’re In

From the moment you enter, the work confronts you with the relentless weight of the recent past — wars, displacements, and political fractures bleeding into the present. This opening section, History Now, hurls you into a relentless visual field where conflict unfolds in jagged layers. Tillmans appropriates fragments of global violence, collaging images that include the heavy boots of soldiers marching through Moscow streets, migrants caught in the liminal space of the US-Mexico border and screen grabs from social media, news clippings and digital fragments. This dense mesh of visuals assaults the viewer’s perception, laying bare the construction of public consciousness around conflict and crisis. Tillmans strips away any veneer of detachment, forcing a reckoning with the mechanisms that shape our understanding of global suffering. Here, photography becomes a battleground for truth, propaganda, and the fragile hope of empathy.

The Ocean’s Quiet Rage

The pace shifts in the second section, The State We’re In, where Tillmans turns his gaze toward the elemental and the abstract. Here, the restless sea becomes a metaphor for the fragile condition of both humanity and the environment. The waves are not peaceful; they pulse with tension, reflecting a world caught between flow and fracture, motion and stasis. Through blurred, shifting images of water, Tillmans captures a silent rage — the slow violence of climate change and ecological collapse reverberating beneath the surface of everyday life. This watery expanse draws connections between the shifting tides of human existence and the fragile conditions sustaining life on the planet. The ocean here is not merely a backdrop but an active, fluid force, mirroring uncertainty and vulnerability. It is a quiet scream in the storm, inviting reflection on the deep currents shaping our present and future.

Screens as Sanctuary

The exhibition’s third part, Autoformation (Self Education), claims the library’s former role as a place of learning but twists it into something more fractured and urgent. Here, dozens of isolated computer terminals stand arranged in a strict grid, each a separate portal into Tillmans’ multimedia universe. Each screen presents a unique piece of work — a film, an audio narrative, a podcast, or a sonic experiment — inviting the visitor into a solitary, immersive experience. The installation dismantles passive consumption, making education an active, even disjointed, process. You cannot simply drift through these stations; you must focus, listen, absorb fragments of information that resist neat storytelling. The installation stages continuous education as a survival tactic, pushing back against the chaos of misinformation and the erosion of public discourse. It foregrounds the necessity of ongoing learning across all ages, confronting the fractured ways knowledge circulates in a digital world saturated with noise.

Printed Traces

In the section Shelves, Tillmans brings the physicality that is inherent of his photographic work back into the frame with a dense collection of printed materials — posters, zines, artist books — that bleed history, ideology and rebellion from their surfaces. These objects anchor his sprawling work in the tactile world, insisting on a slow, deliberate engagement that defies the fleeting nature of digital consumption. His printed ephemera carry scars, stains, and marks of repeated handling, as if they have lived through the social and political upheavals they document. The presence of these materials speaks to the persistence of countercultural networks — communities of resistance that thrive in the margins, fueled by words and images spread through clandestine channels. Tillmans frames these printed relics as weapons in the struggle against erasure and complacency, reminding us the importance of knowledge building especially in an historical time in which anti-intellectualism has become synonymous with fascism.

Leaf-Through Archives

A striking feature of the exhibition is the cluster of four large library tables repurposed as dynamic hubs for Tillmans’ archival publications . These tables, once grey and anonymous, now bear the weight of diverse thematic currents that pulse through his work. Each table cradles a distinct cluster of catalogs and volumes from abstract visual experiments to pointed political critiques, from sociological inquiry to raw portraits of rebellious youth. The visitor becomes a participant in an unfolding dialogue, flipping pages, tracing the web of ideas, and confronting the restless intersections of art and activism. These tactile archives refuse neat categorisation or passive consumption; instead, they encourage a messy, open-ended exploration that mirrors the complexity of Tillmans’ vision. At its core, Nothing Could Have Prepared Us – Everything Could Have Prepared Us redefines photography not as documentation but as confrontation. Tillmans pulls images from the realm of passive observation into the space of active reckoning. He strips away the easy consumption of the image and exposes its power to shape belief, stir memory and demand response. This exhibition is not a retreat but a call to arms, an invitation to face the fractured world with eyes open wide, aware of the dangers and the possibilities held within the photograph’s frame. It is a dark reckoning, but one necessary for any hope of change.