Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi: Freudian Typo

10 Jun-31 Aug 2025

Overview

In the HENI Project Space, Hayward Gallery

Explore a multi-layered exhibition of new work collectively created by two Iranian-Canadian artists, featuring image-based works, sculpture, video and found objects.

Punning and playful, Freudian Typo invites visitors to consider how the English language, entangled with the vocabulary of corporate finance, debt and development, underpins the globally precarious state of land, bodies and truth.

The exhibition draws on English nursery rhymes like ‘The Old Woman and Her Pig’ and ‘This Is the House That Jack Built’ – narratives marked by monetary exchange, debt and catastrophe. In these fables, the artists trace the roots of ongoing cycles of dispossession, accumulation, and re-possession.

At the exhibition’s centre, a hyper-realistic sculpture of Palmerston, the former resident Chief Mouser cat of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, regards an electronic motorway sign upon which is displayed the phrase ‘Truth and Reconsolidation’.

Ali Ahadi is an artist and scholar based in Vancouver, Canada. His practice spans site-specific installations, sculpture, photo and video-based works, writing and translation. He has exhibited in a body of solo and group exhibitions at Griffin Art Projects, Ag Galerie, Tehran’s 8th Sculpture Biennial, Milan Image Art, Grunt Gallery, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, and Richmond Art Gallery, to name a few. He holds a PhD and MFA from the University of British Columbia where he currently teaches.

Ghazaleh Avarzamani is a London-based artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation. She has an MFA from Central Saint Martins, London. She has exhibited at the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, MOCA Toronto, Dhaka Art Summit and Frieze Sculpture Park among many others, and her work is held in collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Rockefeller Center, Arsenal Contemporary, MOCA Toronto, TD Art Collection, Google and Red Mansion.

FREE- no booking required