Chopped Liver Press / Posters / 2019

Goodman Gallery Cape Town 16 April – 8 June 2019

Chopped Liver Press was founded by artists Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin to publish limited edition books and posters. The posters in this exhibition are made from selected pages from the International New York Times, and hand-printed by Broomberg & Chanarin at their studio in London. Every text appears on 100 different sheets of newspaper, forming an edition of 100 unique works. A selection of 30 works from different series form the exhibition.

Each poster features a different quote, signalling a chronology of influences and ideas on the artists: from the Yiddish insult ‘May an umbrella open up inside you’ to a quote by Carlo Levi stating that ‘The future has an ancient heart’. The articles, advertisements and images on broadsheet paper each create new meanings and parallels for the screen-printed text that has been overlaid. One sheet reads ‘More die of heart break’ (the title of Saul Bellow’s 1987 novel) over a headline reading ‘Killings dredge up a legacy of racist laws’. The novel explores themes that include how ideals can be reconciled with realities, a motif that is present in each of the posters through a juxtaposition of preserved quotes with throw-away daily news headlines.