Sarah Sze’s ‘Metronome’ is about quiet contemplation, not just the clicks

Set in a long-abandoned vaulted room in the upper levels of a busy Victorian railway station, artist Sarah Sze has created a dynamic and dense installation that captures the essence of our image-saturated age. The New York-based architect worked in collaboration with Artangel to shape her piece Metronome for this space (help also came from the Aarhus Art Museum, the Officine Grandi Riparazioni in Turin and the Victoria Miro gallery, along with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies and The Arch Company).

Sze’s work frequently makes use of a dense assemblage of everyday objects, shaped and framed by the ever-changing angle of the viewer. Metronome occupies one half of this former waiting room, once the station’s crowning glory but latterly lost to the community and boarded up for six decades. It’s only in the last few years that a light touch restoration has brought the delicate space back into use with temporary shows and visits, accessed via a similarly grand wrought iron staircase. 

Sze’s installation is the first major artwork to engage with the room, building on Artangel’s long-standing tradition of integrating temporary artworks into architecture. These have included a performance in the abandoned Wiltshire village of Imber, Michael Landy’s Breakdown in a former C&A shop on Oxford Street, David Kohn and Fiona Banner's Room for London, high up on the South Bank Centre, and Roger Hiorns’ mesmerising Seizure, a crystal cavern grown in a former South London council flat. 

Ascend the Peckham staircase and you’re greeted by a hovering segment of an orb, formed from what appear to be fragmented screens mounted on a spindly matrix of stainless-steel tubes. The screens are actually pieces of torn-up card and paper, upon which an array of imagery is projected, loops of fire, countdowns, dough being kneaded, cards being shuffled, along with blooming abstract forms and slow-motion animations. 

Metronome is also soundtracked by the eponymous click, in addition to the sound of the 42 projectors generating all of this imagery, themselves stacked up seemingly haphazardly around the back of the globe, some turning their lenses on the pockmarked walls of the room. ‘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 artist writes, and the installation is analogous to a post-mortem of our smartphones, with their infinite capacity for creating, storing and conveying images. 

As Sze puts it, ‘we are in the middle of an extreme hurricane where we are learning to speak through images at an exponential pace’. There’s an obvious irony at play here, as this intriguing, fragile and meticulous assemblage itself becomes a source of imagery for novelty-hungry social media accounts. The cycle of image creation continues. Or you could just sit down and take in the spectacle at your own speed.

Sarah Sze, Metronome, is at The Waiting Room, Peckham Rye Station, London, until 17 September 2023, Wednesday-Saturday: 12-8pm; Sunday:  11am–5pm, Artangel.org.uk

Close by, arts organisation Bold Tendencies has opened its annual show in Peckham’s infamous multi-storey car park turned arts and creative centre. Crisis features work by Emory Douglas Jenny Holzer, Kahlil Robert Irving, Sandra Poulson and Abbas Zahedi. Crisis runs at Bold Tendencies until 16 September 2023, BoldTendencies.com