Sarah Sze’s The Waiting Room is an astonishing phantasmagoria, filling the gloom of a long abandoned and forgotten interior in Peckham Rye railway station in London with sound and images. Built in 1865, the station included an especially vast, high-ceilinged waiting room, which closed more than a century ago. All but forgotten for more than 50 years, few who use the station know it is there, up a flight of stairs near the station entrance. Old-fashioned hand-painted signage on the stairs points up to the billiard hall which replaced the waiting room in 1922, though that too was closed down at the end of the 1950s. Since then, the room has been empty. Artangel, which commissioned Sze’s project, has once again married an artist and a space. It is more than a venue. The whole thing feels like an experiment in time travel, a vision of things to come created in the slipstream of a bygone age.
Visitors might be forgiven for thinking they had found themselves pitched into the kind of sci-fi world imagined by HG Wells, or confronted by a steampunk technological apparition which has suddenly materialised from another dimension. Sze’s work fills the space with projections that travel the ruined walls and are cast on numerous larger and smaller screens set into the concave face of a huge hemispherical structure in the centre of the space. Each little screen is a piece of deckle-edged paper. They are like pages from a 19th-century notebook. All are mounted on a supporting structure of slender stainless steel rods and clamps. The whole arrangement creates the illusion of a sphere or globe hanging magically in space. A projected puddle of water pools on the floor beneath this structure. It is as if the world were leaking.
Everything flickers and flows and erupts in Sze’s kaleidoscopic magic-lantern slideshow for the smartphone age. The space teems with a constantly shifting glut of proliferating images. There’s orchestration to the ebb and flow of teeming images: at one point a vast flock of birds migrates across the screens and flies round the surrounding walls. Rhinos make their way across the savannah and an ostrich runs through the grass. A cyclist wobbles on the road, a hand shuffles cards, volcanoes erupt, candles flicker and oil burns in a pot of oil. The whole arrangement clangs to a regular metronomic pulse, and beyond the walls real trains rumble around us as they pass through the station. Are we running on clockwork or digital time?
This is a waiting room at the end of the world. Will the birds ever return? Is this their last flight? Much of the imagery has been sourced from the internet, and some has been shot by the American artist herself on her phone. As well as nature footage, closeups of geological events and intimate shots of people (who only appear in passing, as tantalising glimpses of bits of bodies), we see snatches of the hand-drawn and painted, examples of a passing age of the analogue reproduction and recording. A black ink Rorschach blot spreads. Drops of blue paint spatter the white sheets of paper, and are gone again. A grey lump resolves into footage of a woman peering through a window. Images pixelate and disappear. They come in waves and surges. A hawk quarters the walls in a little oval of light.
The sensation is that of a brain fried by too much information, too much screen-surfing, too much doomscrolling, too much YouTube and TikTok. We just can’t escape our compulsive swiping, grazing and flipping from one thing to the next, drowning in the surfeit and speed of electronic information. To the rear of the space, beyond the flickering globe, the scaffolding of slender rods continues, supporting tabletops decked with slowly revolving stacked projectors and the accumulated mess left by people at work – coffee cups and water bottles and any amount of incidental stuff. This is the eccentric scientist’s workstation, where they’ve lashed together their latest madcap experiment. The rods themselves also turn into a kind of artificial life, sprouting branches and whitened leaves that cast their own shadows among the networks of metal rods, and the people moving through the installation.
As much as they have been constructed, Sze’s sculptural installations often appear to have grown and developed according to their own laws. She has always revelled in complications, both physical and metaphorical. Ideas twist, dangle, sprout, conflate, conjoin, extrapolate and sprawl. With this new work, I think Sze wants to pitch the natural against the technological. The speed is ramping up. For all its presentiments of catastrophe, The Waiting Room is exhilarating. It is enough to make you miss your train. Astonished and beguiled, I just stood and gawped, and was swept away.
