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.
