A Library Remembered: Wolfgang Tillmans at the Centre Pompidou, Paris

When I arrived at the Centre Pompidou on July 26, 2025, I approached the ticket desk and told the agent, “I’m here for the library—I’m looking for a book.” She frowned sympathetically and explained that the Bibliothèque publique d’information (BPI) was closed for the upcoming five-year renovation—and that the only thing I could see was the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition on Level 2. I didn’t know anything about it, but since I was already there, I handed over the €17 and climbed the escalators.

What I found was more than a book. The library was gone—and yet, profoundly present.

At the heart of the Centre Pompidou stood one of France’s most important civic spaces: the Bibliothèque publique d’information (BPI). Opened in1977 alongside the museum, the BPI served as a free, public library—a rare non-circulating, multilingual resource for students, researchers, travelers, and the general public. With its bright interior, long rows of desks, open stacks, and glass walls overlooking Paris, it wasn’t just a library. It was a temple of access—a place where anyone could read, write, rest, or resist.

For decades, the BPI symbolized the Pompidou’s ethos: modern, public, intellectual, and inclusive. It welcomed more than a million visitors annually, making it one of the most visited libraries in Europe.

But now, as the Pompidou begins a five-year renovation project (set to reopen in 2030), the BPI has been closed and cleared out. Its stacks dismantled. Its furniture removed. Its silence no longer studious, but hollow.

When I visited this summer, in the place of the BPI stood something unexpected: an exhibition by German artist and photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, installed inside the former library as if it were still a living, breathing knowledge space.

Pompidou. Wolfgang Tillmans. 2025.pdf

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The exhibition Catalogue "Nothing could have prepared us Everything could have prepared us"

A Library Transformed—And Reflected

This was my first visit to the Pompidou, and I had no prior exhibitions here to compare it to. I also didn’t know Tillmans’ work well. But the reimagined library space drew me in. Through it, I connected.

Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us is not just an exhibition title. It’s a meditation on the moment we are in. In this massive, now-empty 6,000 m² space, Tillmans has installed images, documents, videos, and objects in a way that mimics the layout and ethos of the BPI. The show feels archival. It feels communal. Tables sit like reading desks. Paper ephemera is laid out like research materials. Photographs line the walls in ways that suggest memory, not decoration.

There was no prescribed route through the exhibition. The arrangement of images, sound, text, and protest ephemera felt like the inside of a fragmented archive—fluid, nonlinear, democratic. It echoed the work I do, but it also pushed me to reflect on what happens when archives become vulnerable spaces, subject not only to artistic interpretation but also to political interference.

This echo of the library was startling and emotional for me. I had come expecting to engage with a living institution. But instead, I walked into a ghost of access—a place that once held so much knowledge now offering only the memory of it. And yet, that absence made the exhibition more powerful. The library’s erasure made the politics of Tillmans’ work sharper. The silence amplified the urgency.

As an archivist, I couldn’t help but feel the layers of irony. A library is removed. An artist returns it in form but not function. And somewhere in that hollowed shell, the exhibition becomes a quiet elegy for public memory—and a defiant act of preservation.

As an archivist, I found this deeply affecting. What was meant to be absence had been transformed into an aesthetic—a memory of what once was. It raised questions I couldn’t shake.

When Archives Are Attacked

This exhibition takes place amid a shifting and often hostile climate for archives and memory institutions. In the U.S., the removal of Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden, and the dismissal of Archivist of the United States Dr. Colleen Shogan, are more than just administrative reshuffles—they are acts of silencing.

Dr. Hayden was the first woman and first African American to serve as Librarian of Congress, and a longtime advocate for equitable access to information. Dr. Shogan, a political scientist, had been working to modernize and protect the role of archives in democracy. Their sudden dismissals suggest an assault not just on institutions, but on the very idea that memory should be free, public, and preserved.

Inside Tillmans’ faux-library, this reality felt sharper. A closed library in Paris. Two removed memory workers in Washington. Across borders, the question remained: Who gets to keep the archive alive? Who gets erased? Who gets remembered?

A Radical Elegy

Tillmans’ installation isn’t just a retrospective—it’s a meditation on power, fragility, and the poetics of loss. There are images of protest, joy, intimacy, migration, surveillance, and disinformation. Each room feels like a fragment of a larger argument: that memory is always political, and its stewards are rarely safe from interference.

As I walked through the reimagined BPI, I felt the weight of these recent events in the U.S. pressing in. It made me wonder: What would it look like if the U.S. handed over the Library of Congress or the National Archives to an artist as their final act before closure? What kind of truth would surface? Would we call it radical? Or simply honest?

Exhibition Details

• 🗓️ Dates: June 13 – September 22, 2025

• 🏛️ Centre Pompidou closes: End of 2025, reopening in 2030

• 📍 Location: Former BPI Library, Level 2

• 🎟️ Admission: Free on June 13, July 3, August 28, and September 22

• ⚠️ Note: This is not a functioning library. It is its echo.

Final Reflections

I came to see an exhibition and found a silent eulogy. I came looking for a library and found a space reconstituted in its image. I left thinking about the fragility of archives—how easily they’re dismantled, and how desperately we need to fight for them.

This exhibition, for me, was not only about Wolfgang Tillmans. It was about Carla Hayden. About Colleen Shogan. About the thousands of memory workers who resist erasure every day. It was about what’s lost when public access becomes a political target, and what can still be preserved—by artists, archivists, and the people who walk through these halls with memory heavy in their hands.

Wolfgang Tillmans Biography

• Born: August 16, 1968, in Remscheid, Germany. 

• Education: Studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design (1987–1992). 

• Career Milestones:

  
  

  • Began photographing Berlin and London club and rave scenes in the early 1990s. 

  • His signature installation style—non‑hierarchical arrangements of tape‑pinned and printed photographs—emerged in mid‑1990s London. 

  • In 2000, became the first photographer and first non‑British artist to win the Turner Prize. 

  • Major retrospectives at Tate Modern, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Moderna Museet, and near‑global recognition. 

  • His work addresses politics, HIV/AIDS, LGBTQ+ identity, media ecology, climate, and migration, and he remains politically engaged—campaigning against Brexit and right‑wing extremism. 

📚 Notable Publications by Wolfgang Tillmans

Here’s a selection of significant books that represent key phases and themes in his career:

• Wolfgang Tillmans (Taschen, 1995 / reissued 2002) – A foundational monograph introducing his early work across rave, portraiture, and still life. 

• Concorde (Walther König, Köln, 1997) – Photography capturing movement, abstraction, and architectural form. 

• Soldiers – The Nineties (Walther König, 1999) – Political and archival images exploring protest and history in the 1990s. 

• If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters (Tate, 2003) – Exhibition catalog expanding into global socio‑political photography. 

• Wako Book 3 (Hatje Cantz, 2011) – Part of a series of artist‑edited publishing projects blending formats. 

• Neue Welt (Taschen, 2012) – Large‑format color photographs of global landscapes and social life. 

• four books (Taschen, 2020 edition compiled by the artist) – A 40th‑anniversary compilation selecting work across decades, curated by Tillmans himself. 

• Today Is The First Day (IMMA, WIELS, Koenig Books, 2020) – Catalogue of his Dublin/Brussels and Brussels/Dublin exhibitions, rich in political and archival themes. 

• Saturated Light / Gesättigtes Licht (Galerie Buchholz / König, 2021) – Features large-scale “Silver works” exploring abstraction and photographic materiality. 

• To Look Without Fear / Wolfgang Tillmans: Reader (MoMA, 2022) – A massive retrospective with essays and interviews, documenting four decades of his practice. 

-sR