Metronomic Overground:Sarah Sze @ Peckham Rye station.

"Everybody's moving, moving, moving, moving. Please don't leave me to remain" - Waiting Room, Fugazi.

 

Who knew? I've lived within half an hour's walk of Peckham Rye station for twenty-seven years. I've used the station hundreds of times. I've walked past it thousands of times. It's a vibrant area. You've got your standard Rye Lane phone repair shops, vegan eateries, charity shops, Frank's Campari bar (best views of London), the quirky John the Unicorn pub, Khan's Bazaar, the Peckham Levels, Peckhamplex, and the hugely underrated Il Giardino restaurant.

The station itself is fairly quotidian. It's a place to travel to and a place to travel from. It's not a destination in and of itself. But, unknown to me and almost everyone else, there's a rather large and previously unused billiards room up a couple of flights of stairs near the entrance and it is there that Boston's Sarah Sze was hosting her exhibition The Waiting Room.

One that had received warm praise and one, sadly, that didn't really deserve that warm praise. Under the aegis of Artangel, who are normally excellent, Sze's filled the room with screens of all shapes and sizes. As you sit on a wooden chair, or pace round the room, looking at them, a metronomic beat ticks away. Tick tick tick.

Like a bomb waiting to explode. But the bomb never does explode. You just look at screens - and on those screens very little is happening. There are even projections on the walls round the back of the screens and though they're larger and a little more impressive, it's still a case of nothing happening in real time.

The most interesting thing is probably the leaflet you pick up from a friendly invigilator on entering the gallery. It tells of the waiting room/billiards room being opened in 1865 and it tells of the fact that, on average, five billion photographs are taken on mobile phones everyday. Many of them, presumably, far more interesting than the ones Sze has included in her work.

The leaflet talks about Sze's interest in how time and space are speeding up but, again, you could probably get an AI chatbot to make this work and it would be more, not less, interesting. I stayed for a while to see if anything happened. It didn't. So I left. I walked down Rye Lane and popped into Greggs where I bought a vegan sausage roll, a glazed ring doughnut, a packet of prawn cocktail crisps, and a pink lemonade. Later that evening I took ketamine for the first time ever. Now that WAS an experience.