In 2014 an artist took a short contract in Vancouver. The contract ended, a visa expired, and the next seven years were spent in four countries. Nothing about the original decision suggested any of this. THE WAY gathers work by thirty-eight artists, three of them presenting live work, each proceeding from a moment of that size: small, unremarkable at the time, and identifiable as a turning point only long afterwards.
A Room That Has Lived Several Lives
Located above the ticket hall of Peckham Rye Station, the Old Waiting Room was designed by Charles Henry Driver and completed in 1865. It has been a waiting area for around a hundred commuters at a time, a billiard room for station staff, and a venue for illicit raves, while also remaining closed and disused for decades, even as trains continued to run beneath it. Since its restoration it has re-emerged as a space that opens intermittently for art: in 2023 it housed Metronome by Sarah Sze, commissioned by Artangel, and it has since hosted exhibitions, film programmes and performance. The way the room has accumulated uses mirrors the accumulation of turns in the exhibition itself: unplanned, spontaneous, and legible as a trajectory only in retrospect. Structurally, it remains a room defined by the interval between events. That is a difficult premise to compete with, and THE WAY does not try to.
What Does Not Reach the Headline
The exhibition is arranged without a fixed route. There is no chronology, no thematic grouping, and no argument that resolves at the far wall. Visitors arrive at the works in whatever order the room permits, which is closer to how these moments are encountered in a life than any sequence a curator might impose. Three of the thirty-eight artists work in live form, placing part of the exhibition on a schedule rather than on a wall.
THE WAY does not ask what a life amounts to, nor does it treat the individual as a case study for a larger condition. It asks what a life pivoted on, and accepts that the answer is usually too small to be defended in public: a contract that ended, a language never shared, a body that changed without asking.
The turns on display are, for the most part, not decisions. R James Healy's Made in Strathcona: CRAB Park watches shipping containers rearrange themselves at the Vancouver port and finds in that industrial shuffling an unwanted mirror for his own displacement. Elina Browerman's eyesight began to fail. She answered it by fitting her grandfather's 1950s Soviet lens, an object that witnessed her Leningrad childhood, to a digital sensor, choosing the blur over the resolution otherwise available to her. Pinned to Bloom is the result: a tulip bulb pierced with dressmaker's pins, resting on weathered books under cold blue light.
Two further works push the turn away from the self. Millieon Hu could not speak her grandmother's dialect, and her grandmother could not speak Mandarin. My Way recovers the last question the older woman asked her through a cloned voice, repeated in dialect, Mandarin and English; AI-generated footage of a mountain road resolves slowly into the actual recording. Joy Wang removes human intention altogether. Moisture films mould spreading through a damp interior, redrawing the boundaries of a room while meaning nothing by it, on the grounds that a space is not a fixed backdrop but something continuously remade by movements nobody authorised.
None of these turns would survive a biography. They are the wrong size: too specific to generalise from, too ordinary to dramatise, and in several cases only identifiable years after the fact. That is the condition this exhibition is built to hold.