We have rarely seen an institutional exhibition more free from norms. A bare – or almost – 6,000 square meter stage, on the site of the former Public Library. An exhibition with no imposed artistic direction, no thematic or chronological thread. Total carte blanche given to the artist in a cult building for his very last exhibition before its closure for renovation, starting in September 2025.
It took no less to convince Wolfgang Tillmans to anchor this unusual space, which he compares to “a spaceship”. In this place, not designed for exhibitions, since it has no walls, the German artist dynamites the conventional exhibition process. “It created a huge challenge for somebody who’s mainly wall-based, but I thought, we can’t build walls everywhere. It became a process of working on displays and exhibition design and architecture to create a flow landscape.”
Willmans accommodates everything. Here, the geometric patterns of the carpet serve as a reference point for placing his colorful prints or his XXL prints of landscapes and aerial views. There, the narrowness of a corridor accommodates a series on sewer rats; another, wider corridor, houses several of his photographs of rave parties and gay clubs. With malicious pleasure, he mixes mediums, scales, eras and meanings, with no hierarchy other than his own.
His color photographs sit alongside inkjet prints, postcard-sized images, and press clippings. “There are connections between all of these works. Yet, I invite you to not read my exhibitions in a linear way,” he warns. Gone is the sacralization of photography under glass. His image is frameless, hung with crocodile clips, when it is not attached directly to the wall with thumbtacks or adhesive tape.
What matters to Tillmans is capturing the substance of the world around him. The exhibition thus opens with two of his formal experiments. The first, Sound is Liquid, was taken during a tropical storm, with the intention of “to freeze the raindrops when falling.” The other depicts a wall of light bulbs in an electronics store in Hong Kong. “I knew there were LED lights, and I wanted to see if I could depict the flicker.” A quest for the photographic absolute.
Even if it means going without a camera to better capture a sensation. “I usually use a camera, but sometimes there is just a process of projecting light onto photosensitive paper, without the intervention of the camera, or even without negatives.” This gradual shift from figurative photography to pure abstraction can be seen in Paper Drop , a work of purity where the photographic subject is nothing other than a sheet of paper folded back on itself, on a white background.
By the way, is this still photography? Tillmans is convinced of it. “All abstract images are themselves images of something. Each one is an impression on paper that has caught light. In this sense, they are essentially photographic,” recalls the artist whose early works were composed of grayscale photocopies. This radical formal research is at the heart of the exhibition, which Tillmans describes as an “an experience” rather than a retrospective.
The BPI, with its reprographics room , naturally enchants him. Laser photocopying, as a technology that can enlarge images by up to 400%, is given the same treatment as the camera. “This is always an interest of mine, where technology and art work together. Andy Warhol’s art only became possible because of the invention of the photo of silk screen in the late ’50s. Or music that I loved so much, Acid House, only became possible because of the Roland 303 baseline computer.”
The artist’s social and political commitment is not to be outdone. His photographs in support of minorities and countercultures are partly grouped together on old metal shelves in the library, left there deliberately. Images of Black Lives Matter protests, a symbol of the fight against police violence against the Black community in the United States, or of LGBT activists: “Nice here. But have you ever been to Kyrgyzstan?” reads a banner from a group of young Berliners.
Taken together, as a “constellation,” all these images read like fragments of lived history. They question the cohesion of the European Union, challenge ideological dogmas, and seem to hold up a mirror in which hard-won freedoms and social progress are once again put to the test. A photograph of a military parade in Moscow, taken in 2005, in the early days of Putin’s reign, bears witness to this.
“A work like Russian Army that I did at the time, is being struck by the visuality of the militarism that I didn’t feel familiar with in living times. It felt like something from the past, but it also felt very real in front of my eyes and contrasted with Christian Dior’s shopping window in the background. A future clash could be seen in this clash of systems. I could sense it, not knowing what would happen, but there was something brewing for sure.”
“Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us” by Wolfang Tillmans is on display at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris until September 22, 2025.
