GHAZALEH AVARZAMANI

Freudian Typo
Mixed Media Installation
2025


A collaborative project by Ali Ahadi and Ghazaleh Avarzamani (Freudian Typo) held at Hayward gallery. Punning and playful, the exhibition explores 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 rhyme ‘The Old Woman and Her Pig’ narrative marked by monetary exchange, debt and catastrophe. In these fable, the artists trace the roots of ongoing cycles of dispossession, accumulation, and re-possession.

"An olde woman was sweep'ng the filth in the house that Jack had built, wherein she found a little crooked Sixpence in capital, of which the origin was olde, olde as the first gylt. "How shal I cumulate this little Tanner?" mused the woman. Her eyes glistered as she heard a holy breath, that of John Sigismund Tanner, whose hand once carved the king's face in silver at the London’s Tower, where the Royal Mint sang its metal songes — the coin so took his name, and with it, his manner. “Go thee to the nearby Laissez-faire market,” advised Mr. Tanner, “whose hands be invisible as a moor in the darke, whose rules be freer than the holder of gylt, the lord of stark.” “There thy wee Tanner shal buy thee a little pig, whose flesh of the market’s word, whose skin shal be tanned by the tanner of thy Lord.” With the little pig in tow, homeward bound they came upon the house’s stile, the which thought the olde woman the pig was ne’er meant to reconcile. A little further she went, and there met a dog, whom she asked to bite the pig, so that he might leap over the stile. "I shan't," said the dog. Thus began a weary course, where each being she visited denied her, turn'ng her plea away in kind. So cried the woman, with hope turned hollow, from one to the next in her woeful follow: "stick, stick, beat the dog, he shan't bite", "fire, fire, burn the stick, it shan't beat", "water, water, quench the fire, it shan't burn", "ox, ox, drink the water, it shan't quench", "butcher, butcher, kill the ox, he shan't drink", "rope, rope, hang the butcher, he shan't kill"; "rat, rat, gnaw the rope, it shan't hang". Denied at each turning, the one colder than the last, the olde woman fell into ruth, with her little capital, a reckon of truth. Then came the miracle to pass at last, sent by He who is mercy, as the market’s cast. Sent by the invisible hand, a cat appeared in the woman’s sight — one who made a demand to solve her plight, the which, once met, set the cat to kill the rat — and so, through the binding of righteous wills, the course reversed, and over the stile the pig went. Thus, the cat set the tale aright."

Freudian Typo
Installation view
2025

Of A Croocked Tanner
Archival pigment print
52.3x62 in. (133x158 cm)
2025

A Tanner
Archival pigment print
48x62 in. (123x158 cm)
2025

A Tanner For Hide
Archival pigment print
48x62 in. (123x158 cm)
2025

John Sigmund Tanner Goes to Work
Archival pigment print
42.5x62 in. (108x158 cm)
2025

The Minting od a Tanner
Archival pigment print
48x62 in. (123x158 cm)
2025

A Tanner in the Mint
Archival pigment print
40.5x62 in. (103x158 cm)
2025

Black Line and the Edifice
Vinyl, MDF, prespex, paint
2025

Landscape of a Necessary Fix
Single channel video, 11 min
2025

Freudian Typo
Variable message road sign
2025

Thus Regard Palmerston
Mixed Media, Ladder
2025

Concrete Abstract Subtraction
Steel bike rack, Concrete
2025