Time Travelogues From Those Left Waiting – Harmeet Singh Rahal / Acme Propeller Factory, London

I was invited to see Time Travelogues From Those Left Waiting, a film and installation by Harmeet Singh Rahal at the Acme Propeller Factory, and found myself drawn into a world where time is fluid and powerful.

Time Travelogues From Those Left Waiting

There’s a line that repeats in Time Travelogues From Those Left Waiting, Harmeet Singh Rahal’s new film and installation commissioned by Deptford X and on view at Acme Propeller Factory. “Blood is yet, blood / If it spills, it will clot / Tyranny is yet, tyranny / If it grows, it will collapse.” Appearing on screen, it’s part poem, part mantra, part warning. It plays over footage that slips between documentary and dream: street dogs panting, horns blaring, washed-out signage, the briefly-encountered strangers of a busy city. The film was shot in Mumbai, but it resists straightforward portrayal. Instead, it becomes a study in temporal tension: the dislocation one feels after a long absence from a once-familiar city. Past and future bleed into the present. Decay and development co-exist.

Rahal doesn’t seem interested in tidy arcs. Instead, the work opens up space for slippage between memory and observation, fiction and truth. As we encounter phrases conjuring violence, judgement, reckoning, we’re reminded that history often hinges on absences. Unfulfilled promises, unmaterialised hopes, colonial afterlives. The film gestures toward political disillusionment without becoming didactic. The polluted waterways and incomplete infrastructure projects speak for themselves.

That phrase again: tyranny is yet, tyranny. What Rahal offers here is a politics of endurance. Survival through waiting. Resistance through the passing of time. The small rituals of life, crossing the street, petting a stray dog, take on significance. The macro becomes legible in the micro. In this way, Time Travelogues From Those Left Waiting becomes a chronicle not of collapse, but of persistence. The wound clots. Not healed, but still alive.

Of Waiting Rooms and Empires

If Rahal’s film is restlessly looping through layered futures and memories, the installation at the other end of the room is slower, heavier. A waiting room, or something like it. Hard chairs face off against a trio of artworks. A close look at the seats is rewarded with a Home Office slogan from a notorious anti-immigration campaign. The artist’s description of the installation, “Waiting as Material”, is telling. The work suggests that waiting is not a passive state, but something constructed or enforced. Time weaponised.

This half of Time Travelogues From Those Left Waiting speaks to the ingrained violence of administrative systems. The viewer feels not like a guest, but a case number. It recalls the UK’s immigration infrastructure, but also gestures more broadly to all the structures that demand patience from those least likely to benefit from outcomes. In this context, waiting becomes less a casual pastime, more a survival strategy.

Here, Rahal reaches back not just to colonial histories, but to the habits they’ve seeded. The installation invites comparisons with works by artists like Bouchra Khalili or Lawrence Abu Hamdan, who also map the relationship between institutional power and everyday sound or space. But it’s also unmistakably rooted in Rahal’s own cross-border experience: an artist raised in Mumbai, now living in London, attempting to navigate the psychic geography of both.

There’s an important tension between the two works. The film looks ahead in speculative restlessness. The installation doubles back into historical complications. Between them, they sketch out the limits of time as we experience it. Rahal isn’t offering solutions, but he is asking the right questions. What happens when the clocks no longer work? And what, or who, have we been waiting for?

This work is a commission for Deptford X, a free festival combining commissions, artist-led projects, public artworks, open studios, and a community parade. It’s on until 27 July. Our visit to Time Travelogues From Those Left Waiting coincided with an open studio day at Acme Propeller Factory, a brilliant space that’s well worth a look.

Time Travelogues From Those Left Waiting on until 27 July as part of Deptford X. More info here, free to visit.