Sarah Sze, The Waiting Room – Peckham Rye Station, London

A derelict Victorian train station waiting room is a perfect host for an installation about time and memory in Sarah Sze’s The Waiting Room.

An Unusual Commute

Here is a space I’ve never been in before. I pass through Peckham Rye Station twice daily on my office days. I’m used to the sight of its platforms, some of the regulars who get on and off. It’s one of countless Victorian railway stations in South East London (or indeed London generally), from the capital’s population explosion.

Sarah Sze’s The Waiting Room brings me into new spaces within the station, to hidden corners and forgotten stairwells. Coming at it from platform level, it’s not immediately apparent where to go. I can see the waiting room, but how do I access it? In the end I find my way: out of the station then hard right through an insignificant-looking door. I love abandoned spaces, like time capsules, beautiful in their decay. To find one so close to my commute and hiding in plain sight feels special.

And what an abandoned space this is! Peckham Rye Station’s waiting room is for some reason immense. Perhaps it was originally divided into separate spaces? The four fireplaces hint at such a set up. But today it’s big and cavernous, with a high ceiling. The station’s listed status suggests the waiting room will survive. This wasn’t a foregone conclusion: it shut as a waiting room in the 1920s, became a billiard hall for some decades, then was closed off in the 1950s. Once basically derelict, it now plays host to an intriguingly site-specific installation.

The Waiting Room

Sarah Sze is an American artist and professor at Columbia University. She creates complex installations, often site-specific, out of a range of objects. In The Waiting Room, she has formed a hollowed-out globe from metal and scraps of paper. Numerous projectors play fragments of film and the occasional animation, the images flitting across the screen-like paper scraps or wending their way around the waiting room’s walls. Some of the clips are shot by Sze on her phone, others she has sourced from the internet. Objects, animals and people compete for our attention in a mesmerising dance. The installation is accompanied by two sounds: a ticking clock and a beating heart.

In The Waiting Room, Sze asks us to contemplate two things: the passing of time, and the information age in which we live. The location focuses our minds on the former. What better place to think about time passing than a railway station waiting room, a place which exists in order to watch the clock? The trains pulling in and departing mark the minutes we spend in the exhibition. The latter is more of a cerebral and less of a physical construct. How has our sense of time changed, faced with new technologies and the assault of images and information which is our daily reality?

It’s a complex, intricate work which demands our time in order to fully take it in. Folding chairs around the room encourage us to sit down and watch (and channel those Victorian passengers). Visitors can walk around the installation and get pretty close up if they wish. It’s worth circumnavigating it: it feels different whether you’re looking into the globe or peering at what feels like the ‘behind the scenes’ side: workspaces with detritus and branching forms. I watched it from a couple of positions: watched the world pass me by, as it were.

Artangel

The Waiting Room is here in Peckham thanks to an organisation called Artangel. On their website I read: “We’ve taken over an empty prison, uncovered an underground opera house, made sculpture from solid air, commissioned a mile-high column of light, and a thousand-year-long piece of music.” Does that last one sound familiar? We saw Longplayer at Trinity Buoy Wharf earlier this year. What their commissions have in common is being unexpected. Unexpected places, unexpected durations, unexpected interpretations of what art is or can be.

The Waiting Room is a good introduction to their work. Not too confronting, as a sculptural and multimedia installation is something we can readily understand as art. Visually interesting, and opening up artistic possibilities in what amounts to a disused public(-ish) asset. It was enough to encourage me to sign up to their mailing list in the hopes I can encounter more Artangel works in future.

In the meantime, this one is worth a visit. Peckham Rye is on the Thameslink line and Overground with trains from major hubs like Victoria and London Bridge. You couldn’t ask for a more convenient location once you get there (well, unless you could still access the waiting room from the platform). Set aside half an hour if you want to really experience it without the pressure of time while you contemplate the passage of time.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 3.5/5

Sarah Sze: The Waiting Room on until 17 September 2023