BROADSHEET #1-3 by Hannah Sawtell. Featuring texts by Alun Rowlands and Diedrich Diederichsen.

BROADSHEET #1-3 is a compilation of three broadsheets designed in collaboration with John Morgan studio; printed and distributed by Business week and published on occassion of the exhibitions:

VENDOR, Bloomberg SPACE, 5 October 2012 – 12 January 2013
OSCULATOR, ICA, 9 October – 18 November 2012.

Institute of Contemporary Arts,
The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH
www.ica.org.uk

"Another reading could see Sawtell’s methods as a self-generating or self-effacing set of propositions. Envisage an operating system, unzipped though a string of meta-instructions for generating artworks, which in turn is modified and replaced as the work proceeds, much as current computing architectures write the history of their application in ever-greater capacity and integration. Sawtell visualises material resources as a series of updates with the historical risk that certain ways of running these images maybe irretrievably lost, turning into defunct encryption.

In this analogy, Sawtell offers, right from the beginning, a coded reading that continues, through glitch and user error to bear the underlying structure of earlier haptic systems. This logic is quite different to the dialectic of negation toward a final horizon of resolution at some terminal point. Sawtell abandons previous systems and formats while preserving their general operational capacity. She shows us how to do this through a set of preferences where the language of one system is re-functioned – not simply translated. This convergence opens the commodities depicted to the labour and value congealed within them. The artwork becomes a knowing receptor through the overwriting of junked syntax of images, objects and things."

- Rowlands, A. 'Vendor', In: Broadsheet #1-3, Sawtell, H. ed. ICA and Bloomberg, London 2013