Sarah Sze, The Waiting Room, Peckham Rye Station, review ★★★★★

There’s a great feeling in discovering hidden art or architecture in a space you’ve walked past many times and wondered what’s inside. Now we can do both thanks to the latest project by Artangel, where a spectacular installation by Sarah Sze has been installed within a disused waiting room at Peckham Rye Station. Visitors can enter from a door next to the main entrance of the station and discover a hidden new world.

Entering the darkened space our eyes are drawn to a sphere assembled from metal rods, that looks like something from a dystopian sci-fi, peppered with pieces of paper and card. Projectors are cast on to these card so they become screens that switch from blank to a searing sunset and then images from around the world – this is our fragile planet and we’re looking at it from the inside out.

Accompanied by projections on the walls of flocks of birds and the steady tick of a metronome and the sound of trains projected into space – listen intently and you may hear the real-time sounds of trains passing through the station platforms nearby.

Standardised time in the UK came into existence because of the railways, as they necessitated the need for all of us to be working from the same schedule. The regular ticking in the space is a nod to that history of local times – before the railways connected us, each city would have run to a slightly different time.

These days it’s social media that binds us together across time zones and borders and this panoply of projections feels like us sitting in the centre of the world as it happens around us, much like laying abed and scrolling through our feeds. The big difference is that while sitting on a sofa looking at other people’s Insta may make us feel lazy and inadequate, this installation fills us with a sense of awe.

Sarah Sze’s work in a normal gallery would be impressive but here in the high barrelled ceiling of this rickety room it’s found the perfect space for it. Artangel have a knack for finding fantastic spaces and filling them with impressive artworks, and this time around they’ve pulled off one of their most spectacular efforts to date.

All photographs Thierry Bal.