As seductive as Chagall: Sarah Sze’s The Waiting Room reviewed

Exiting Peckham Rye station, you’re not aware of it, but standing on the platform you can see a mansard roof with ornamental railings silhouetted against the sky like a French chateau. Designed in the 1860s by Charles Henry Driver, architect of Sao Paolo’s Estacao da Luz, it once covered a vaulted waiting room which, after an intermediate existence as a billiard hall, was closed to the public in 1962. In short, it is just the sort of hidden space to tickle the fancies of impresarios-at-large Artangel, who have made it the site of the first UK installation by American artist Sarah Sze.

It’s not Sze’s first commission for a travel hub: her multimedia sculpture ‘Shorter than the Day’ – a fragile sphere spangled with photographs of the New York sky at different times of day – was installed at LaGuardia airport last year. ‘Metronome’ belongs to the same Timekeeper series, the difference being that its images are moving. While Sze’s New York timekeeper appears to stop time, her London one – a hollow hemisphere dotted with blank pages on to which scraps of video are projected – appears to accelerate it. There are a lot of flames – candles, a roaring fire, a volcano and an orange sun rising (or setting in reverse) like a fireball – interleaved with brief glimpses of vegetation: combustion trumps photosynthesis in what feels like a doom loop. Animals appear trapped somewhere in between, an ostrich running endlessly on the spot and a grounded pigeon feebly flapping its wings. Framed by the bricked-up arches of the waiting-room windows, the swirling colours projected on to the surrounding walls are as seductive as a Chagall stained-glass window but more unnerving. The age of the smartphone, says Sze, has unleashed ‘an extreme hurricane’ of imagery – and knowing that pictures snapped by visitors to her installation will be joining an estimated five billion smartphone photos taken a day is not reassuring.