Nothing Could Have Prepared Us – Everything Could Have Prepared Us

Nothing Could Have Prepared Us – Everything Could Have Prepared Us documents an installation that took over the whole second floor of the Bibliothèque publique d'information, the Centre Pompidou's public library. More than three decades of Wolfgang Tillmans's work went up inside a room built for reading, not looking.

Tillmans hangs prints at wildly different sizes and uneven heights, unframed, letting genres mix freely on the wall. Here that method met a working library: shelving, signage, and reading tables stayed in use around the pictures. Photography, music, fashion, architecture, and activism all surface in the selection. The catalogue reproduces the installation itself alongside individual works, so the reader can see how one shapes the other. A group of emerging scholars contributes essays, among them Damarice Amao, Taous Dahmani, and Boaz Levin. Tillmans himself contributes as well, and Florian Ebner and Olga Frydryszak-Rêtat of the Centre Pompidou edited the volume.

Tillmans was born in 1968 in Remscheid, Germany. He has treated exhibition architecture as part of the work since his early Cologne and London shows in the 1990s, and this installation carries that practice into an institution not built for art. The library setting puts Nothing Could Have Prepared Us alongside his other site-responsive projects: Sound Is Liquid at mumok Vienna, and the multi-venue survey To Look Without Fear.