Pompidou Centre Cavan Images/Alamy
If you visit Paris, you must see Wolfgang Tillmans’s Nothing Could Have Prepared Us – Everything Could Have Prepared Us at the Pompidou Centre (pictured above), before it closes for a long refit.
The exhibition, on until 22 September, displays the artist’s longtime dialogue with science, from neuroscience to astronomy. It is sited, appropriately, within the Public Information Library, where it interacts with its environment to ask big questions about the nature of knowledge.
The installation Truth Study Centre, for example, questions how world views are created, with excerpts of research papers looking into the way the brain adapts to dishonesty placed next to newspaper cuttings full of propaganda.
Elsewhere, Tillmans draws our attention to the natural systems we are part of. Photos of turbulent seas and the polluting air vents of data centres highlight the climate crisis and our role in it. His show is a compelling take.
Topics:
