The Library at Closing Time

"Occupying the partially deconstructed public library on the second story of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Wolfgang Tillmans 's current retrospective is a sprawling nonlinear exhibition of his expanded photographic practice from the 1980s to today. The artist's wide-ranging compendium of prints, videos, soundscapes, personal effects, and ephemera is installed in intimate dialogue with the space, and together with numerous site-specific interventions they turn the exhibition into a portrait of the library."

""Nothing Could Have Prepared Us - Everything Could Have Prepared Us" marks the impending five-year-long disappearance of the Centre Pompidou from Parisians' daily lives. The building, which houses both the Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne and the Bibliothèque publique d'information (BPI), is closing for renovation until 2030. In the interim, the museum will diffuse its programming throughout Paris and abroad, and the library will temporarily relocate."

"As the final event in this usually bustling cultural center, the exhibition reverberates throughout the oddly vacated site. The café is closed. The galleries are shut. The cinemas ceased programming last spring. Graffiti scrawled in the windows of the bookshop reads "on se retrouve dans 5 ans" (See you in 5 years). It's as if the building, designed Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers and open to the public since 1977, were gradually slowing its pulse."

Occupying the partially deconstructed public library on the Centre Pompidou's second story in Paris, Wolfgang Tillmans presents a sprawling, nonlinear survey spanning his photographic practice from the 1980s to today. The installation prioritizes the building itself, using prints, videos, soundscapes, personal effects, ephemera, and numerous site-specific interventions to stage an intimate portrait of the library and its interior. The show coincides with the Centre Pompidou and BPI's impending five-year closure for renovation until 2030, during which programming will be dispersed across Paris and the library will relocate. The largely vacated site amplifies the exhibition's sense of absence and institutional pause.

Read at Artforum