Sarah Sze: The Waiting Room: Artangel, Peckham Rye Station, London

For her long-awaited project with Artangel, New York-based artist Sarah Sze is transforming a large Victorian waiting room at Peckham Rye Station that has lain empty for almost 50 years.

An atmospheric construction of cascading lines emerges from the centre of the vaulted waiting room to create a mesmerising model of a fragile world. A multitude of flickering videos illuminate the structure and swirl around the space, conveying the velocity and volatility of living in the age of the smartphone.

The writer Zadie Smith recently compared the experience of Sze’s installations as like being in an opened-up iPhone, with the technology taken apart and the image bank it stores exploded into three-dimensional space. Tactile and imagined experience, momentous and incidental events are held in a precarious equilibrium in Sze’s immersive installation.

Sarah Sze recently said: “I’ve always been interested in certain times throughout history where our relationship to the way we experience time and space in the world speeds up radically. The invention of the aeroplane, the invention of the train, you see really interesting work coming out of that time, in film, visual arts and writing. We are in the middle of an extreme hurricane where we are learning to speak through images at an exponential pace.”

Images above: 

Sarah Sze, Metronome, 2023, Mixed media, projectors, paper, wood, stainless steel

© Sarah Sze Photograph: Thierry Bal