Everard Read's WORDS, WORDS, WORDS exhibition brings together South African artists who merge text and image, pushing boundaries and challenging perceptions of language in contemporary art.

I remember from when I was young, one Springbok Radio announcer saying, rather gleefully: "And that was Talk Talk, with their song 'Talk Talk', off the album Talk Talk."

Something about the wilful absurdity of the sentence, combined with the repetition of the word and its sound, etched the moment into my memory. And it wasn't just me: that became the way groups of friends referring to the seminal post-punk band's early hit.

It was broadly appealing to think about a band joyfully creating confusion between its own identity and that of its output. And not to get too PostMod 101 about it, but singing a song about talking pretty much set the tone for the way Mark Hollis and company would operate from then on, gently mocking conventions and sidestepping expectations by doing subtly surprising things.

It was with this sort of gentle subversion that the show up at the Everard Read Gallery's CIRCA space, titled WORDS, WORDS, WORDS, was curated.

It's obviously not news that words form the cornerstone of many contemporary visual artists' practices.

Since Dada in 1917 and the wonderful double entendre of Marcel Duchamp's R. Mutt (a reference to J.L. Mott...