Acclaimed New York-based artist Sarah Sze will transform a 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 19 May 2023, taking over a large, vaulted space above the main ticket office that has been boarded up for fifty years. The exhibition in London is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies and The Arch Co.
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.
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 said: “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.”
James Lingwood and Michael Morris, Associate Directors of Artangel, said: “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.”
