Sarah Sze to transform disused Victorian waiting room at Peckham Rye train station in south London with a new site-specific sculptural installation. Co-commissioned by Artangel, Sze’s new work will open on Friday 19th May 2023, taking over a large, vaulted space above the main ticket office that has been boarded up for fifty years.
Sze employs painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking and video to build immersive works that explore our relationship to images, materiality, time and entropy. In recent years, she has created a new form of sculpture that offers an extraordinary model of our fragile world. These large-scale installations – which she refers to as Timekeepers – integrate everyday materials, torn photographs and a multitude of flickering videos in immersive environments with their own fragile ecologies. These works explore the tenuous threshold between the digital and the analogue, the tactile and the imagined.
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.
Sarah Sze
In Sze’s new work, an atmospheric construction of cascading lines will emerge from the centre of the long-forgotten space within the active train station. Extending from floor to ceiling, the structure embodies a growth process in a state of formation and flux. The sculpture is animated by fragments of moving images that illuminate its core, creating a vast magic lantern.
Sze’s work conveys the velocity and volatility of life 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. Local and global, the momentous and the incidental are held in a precarious equilibrium.
Sarah Sze creates dynamic sculptural environments that somehow account for the vertiginous experience of living on our fragile planet. We’re delighted Artangel is premiering what promises to be an extraordinary new work in London.
James Lingwood and Michael Morris, Associate Directors of Artangel,
Sarah Sze, 19th May – 17th September 2023, The Old Waiting Room, Peckham Rye Station, London SE15 4RX artangel.org.uk. The exhibition in London is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies & The Arch Co.
Sarah Sze: Timelapse opens at The Guggenheim Museum on March 31st – Sze’s site-specific installations will transform the iconic Guggenheim architecture into a tool for timekeeping and a meditation on the multitude of ways that we mark and experience the passage of time.
Commissioned and produced by Artangel, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum & OGR, Torino with the support of Victoria Miro. Generously supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies With thanks to The Arch Co. and Network Rail Supported by The London Community Foundation, Cockayne – Grants for the Arts, The Henry Moore Foundation, Agnes Gund & Danny and Manizeh Rimer
