‘Metronome’: A New Installation by Professor Sarah Sze

Metronome, a new major installation by Professor Sarah Sze, is on view now through September 17, 2023 as part of her long-awaited show with Artangel, The Waiting Room

The Waiting Room transforms a large Victorian waiting room at Peckham Rye Station that has laid empty for almost 50 years. The exhibition is also the first major presentation in the space since it was closed to the public in 1962.

In Metronome, an atmospheric construction of cascading lines emerges from the center of the vaulted waiting room to create a mesmerizing model of a fragile world. A multitude of flickering videos illuminate the structure and swirl around the space, conveying the velocity and volatility of living in the age of the smartphone.

“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,” Sze said. “The invention of the airplane, 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.”

As reported by The Guardian, The Waiting Room is the last UK show for Artangel’s founder-directors Michael Morris and James Lingwood.

“Seeing one of Sarah’s Timekeeper (2016) installations several years ago was a lightbulb moment,” Lingwood told The Guardian. “[Sze is] an artist finding a brilliant way to convey how we experience time and space today: the marvelous and the mundane, the fleeting and the fragile, all together.”

Sze assembles her installations in real time, with Metronome coming together in less than two weeks.

“Every day, it’s either two steps forward and one back or the other way round, and you just pray that it won’t be three in a row going backwards when you need to keep it moving in the right direction,” Sze said in her interview with The Guardian. “But, you know, sometimes those are the most interesting times, because it forces you to make some very radical decisions.”

Called “spectacular, beautiful and utterly compelling” by the UK’s Evening Standard, The Waiting Room is a transformative experience unlike any other.

Read more about the show and installation here.

Sarah Sze was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003 and represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2013. She has exhibited in museums worldwide, and her works are held in the permanent collections of prominent institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Fondation Cartier, Paris; Tate Modern, London; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles. Sze's work has been featured in the Whitney Biennial (2000), The Carnegie International (1999), and several international Biennials, including Berlin (1998), Guangzhou (2015), Liverpool (2008), Lyon (2009), Sao Paulo (2002), and Venice (1999, 2013, and 2015). Sze has also created public works for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and for the High Line and the Public Art Fund in New York. In 2016, Sze completed a permanent commission for the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority's 96th Street Station of the 2nd Avenue subway line, and in 2015, Phaidon published a monograph on Sze's work as part of the Contemporary Artists Series. Sarah Sze received her BFA from Yale University (1991) and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts (1997). She was born in Boston, Massachusetts and lives and works in New York.