Freudian Typo (Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi): Condensed Word, Displaced Flesh

“A debt is just the perversion of a promise … corrupted by both math and violence.” —David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years

Delfina Foundation is pleased to present Condensed Word, Displaced Flesh, a newly commissioned body of work by Iranian-Canadian artist duo Freudian Typo (Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi).

The exhibition unfolds debt not as a financial anomaly but as a key element that forms the contemporary political economy. The exhibition highlights how historical systems of accumulation and coercion bind singular lives into perpetual debt, turning precarity into a universal human condition.

Departing from the English translation of Chad Gadya—an allegorical tale that operates on a chain of catastrophes and punishments after a little goat is bought for two zuzim (coins)—the exhibition invokes the cunning, crafty, and beguiling tactics of capital, where all accumulation is made to appear as the disappeared. In turn, generations pay the debt they never caused. What vanishes is never capital, but the visibility of those made to repay it—and the ledger that never balances.

Visitors are invited into a ‘Debterinary’, a dreamlike multimedia installation resembling a veterinary, a tax office, and a clinic. It operates along the Freudian mechanisms of condensation and displacement that structure the logic of dreams: meanings are sometimes condensed into a single image, and sometimes displaced onto another that is seemingly separate yet psychically linked. At the heart of the dreamscape is a video where a cat—representing the first debtor who ate the goat in Chad Gadya—undergoes a surreal surgery only to find out that the doctors’ real intention is to search for the two missing coins. When two coins cannot be found, visitors might question who is next on the operating table?

With references to finance, medicine, and classical English literature—particularly Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Othello—visitors also encounter a series of bureaucratic posters, images, and sculptures shaped by the moral grammar of Western Christendom, where debt and finance gave rise to the lexicon of guilt, sin, and redemption. Within this horizon, the exhibition ponders how a shift in the way we imagine collective autonomy and individual agency can emerge through a rupture in the language of finance and morality.

Public programming 
Conversation between Freudian Typo, Mohammad Salemy, and curator Erin Li: Friday, June 13, 6:30-8:00pm

Guided tours
Tuesday, July 9, 6:30-7:30pm: guided tour by artist Ghazaleh Avarzamani
Wednesday, July 23, 9–10am: breakfast and guided tour by curator Erin Li
Saturday, August 9, 10–11am: breakfast and guided tour by artist Ghazaleh Avarzamani

All events are free to attend, but booking is essential. Please visit here.  

Artist biographies
Ali Ahadi (b. Iran) is an Iranian-Canadian Vancouver-based artist. His practice spans site-specific installations, sculpture, photo and video-based works, writing and translation. In Ahadi’s practice, the work is constituted through addressing art’s problems of presentation and representation, demonstration and monsteration, and the entangled relations between aesthetics and the contingencies of abstraction.

Ahadi has participated in a body of solo and group exhibitions at Griffin Art Projects, Ag Galerie, Tehran 8th Sculpture Biennial, Milan Image Art, Grunt Gallery, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Access Gallery, and Richmond Art Gallery, to name a few. He holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of British Columbia. He is currently presenting solo exhibitions at Hayward Gallery, and Delfina Foundation, in collaboration with Ghazaleh Avarzamani. Ahadi teaches in the UBC’s Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, where he previously received his MFA in visual arts in 2012.

Ghazaleh Avarzamani (b. Iran) works primarily in sculpture and installation. Her practice explores inherited knowledge systems, exposing invisible social hierarchies, dysfunctionality, and failure. By reconfiguring materials and constructing visual narratives, she aims to disrupt hegemonic structures and highlight the extraordinary within the ordinary. Avarzamani’s work has been shown internationally, including the Dhaka Art Summit, MOCA Toronto, Toronto Biennial, Aga Khan Museum, and Rockefeller Foundation. She is currently presenting solo exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery and Delfina Foundation in collaboration with Ali Ahadi. Her work is held in major public and private collections.

Credits 
This exhibition has been made possible thanks to the support of the Freudian Typo Exhibition Circle and Delfina Foundation’s Network of Middle East North Africa and South Asia Patrons.

The artists will present a concurrent exhibition titled Freudian Typo at the Hayward Gallery's free HENI Project Space from June 10–August 31, 2025.