Borrowing the graphic style of hoardings, headlines or street signs delivers a message with force and clarity.

Pioneering conceptual artist Mel Bochner is known for the mordant humour of his text works: his colourful fire-sale slogans seem particularly dark at present.

Ibrahim Mahama’s photograph shows the forearm of an itinerant Ghanaian worker, tattooed with their name and birthplace. This declaration of identity is a message in the event of a future calamity: it will allow for their body to be returned to his family should they  die far from home. There are over 70 different ethnic groups throughout Ghana, each with their own language, dialects and traditions. Many of the men and women who have collaborated with Mahama bear these markings, and have migrated across great distances from their remote villages in search of often-hazardous work in marketplaces and ports.

Gary Simmons channels the obsessive scrawl of Jack Nicholson’s character in Kubrick’s The Shining: ‘All Work and No Play…’, the dense lines smeared almost to obscurity. In drawing on this film, Simmons invokes a trope that inhabits our collective consciousness, and by his partial, failed act of erasure makes a connection to the impossibility of eradicating racial and cultural stereotypes from our collective identity.

Sarah Morris’ ‘Sound Graph’ paintings also encode language as visual information. A phrase quoted in one of her films, ‘your words become mine’, is rendered as a hard-edged abstraction drawn from the digital display of sound equipment.

In Douglas Gordon’s scrabble game, the players are passing a coded message, or perhaps an occult power has revealed a hidden truth: ‘It has just begun’.

Wade Guyton has made the single keystrokes ‘X’ and ‘U’ a repeated trope of his digital paintings, and here ‘U’ is extruded into a gleaming minimal sculpture. By employing the same fabricators who produced much of Donald Judd’s works, Guyton makes explicit his dialogue with and deconstruction of minimalist art history. Formally, the U’s act to amplify and mimic themselves, reflecting mirror images of their elegant, highly polished surface while also opening this site of displacement to the viewer’s own image.