Poor. Old. Tired. Horse

This group show of time-honoured and new language-as-image works takes its title from late Concrete Poetry figure Ian Hamilton Finlay's 1960s magazine of visual experiments with graphics and literature. The conceptual territory is huge and the Institute modest in size, but exhibitions director Mark Sladen's careful selection of key works across the genre makes a Tardis of the ICA and the years that separate them concertina like squeezebox bellows.

It's a loosely chronological journey from the ground floor up and a mix of loud and quietly insistent messages. The instructional illusionism of Liliane Lijn's spinning conical statements and Hamilton Finlay's concentric arrangement of port/fishing-related data contrast profoundly but do not interfere with the typewritten pictorial versification of Carl Andre and Henri Chopin.

Black and white banners by master of euphemistic signage Ferdinand Kriwet line the narrow corridor forcing a hypnotic word-association game. Upstairs, meanwhile, Anna Barham's digital projection, of hands tessellating geometric pieces of clear glass or plastic into letters, becomes a gestural threshold between the different political positions of graphic drawing group Hockney, Guston, Smithson et al and cut-and-paste info-age image poets such as Janice Kerbel and Karl Holmqvist. Sue Thompkins's elegant seaside fable hovers between past and present textual sensibilities, conveying the stuttering spark of observation into literary form.

Hamilton Finlay once said: 'Stupidity reduces language to words.' And moving through this concise chapter on the written word as visual tool, witnessing moments where text is allowed to probe the intellectual parts linguistic meaning alone can't reach, you'd have to concede he was on to something.