Sam Moore speaks to artists Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi about their current exhibition, Freudian Typo, at Hayward Gallery.
I could never win a staring contest with Lord Palmerston. Thus Regards Palmerston (2025), a sculpture of a cat, who takes his name from the former Secretary of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office —and later Prime Minister— who was the architect of British foreign policy and imperial expansion, stands vigil as one of the centrepieces in Freudian Typo at Hayward Gallery, an exhibition by the collective of the same name, artists Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi.
Opening the exhibition is Of A Crooked Tanner (2025), which shows the nursery rhyme The Old Woman and Her Pig. This centuries-old song of childhood serves as the jumping-off point for a series of works that explore the interplay malleable language, and the cold materiality of empire and its legacy. At the heart of this are the many meanings of the word Tanner – a colloquial name for the old British sixpence. In the nursery rhyme, this cone, found by an old woman as she cleans the House that Jack Built (another nursery rhyme), but for the artists it leads to a series of images exploring the various applications of the word, and the material realities it conjures: A Tanner (2025) shows the coin (minted in 1948), A Tanner for a Hide,the skin of a pig –which features in the nursery rhyme–that will later be turned into leather. Language, then, is one of the core materials with which the artists have created Freudian Typo; making reference to the idea that in the beginning there was the word, the artists ask me, “is the Word representing reality, or is it creating it?” Throughout Freudian Typo, the Word is pushed to its limits; offering the chance to create a new reality by challenging the idea that language itself is static or able to create objective representations, stressing that the nursery rhymes and wordplay that animate Freudian Typo are “not just a system of communication, but carriers of very real economic and social and political relations.”
At first glance, there’s something inherently playful in the way that artists manipulate language, finding the hidden meanings within nursery rhymes, and connecting the practice of minting coins at the Royal Mint with a fictional eponymic catnip brand featuring the feline Palmerston in the duo of images The Minting of a Tanner and A Tanner in the Mint (both 2025) – two prints with names that run off the tongue with the ease and fluidity of rhyme. But more than that, they excavate the imperial contexts that grease the wheels in nursery rhymes like The Old Woman and Her Pig, and The House that Jack Built; the latter was used in a rhetorical flourish by Thomas Jefferson, prior to his time serving as President of the United States. In their companion show at Delfina Foundation, Condensed Word, Displaced Flesh,the allegorical tale of the Chad Gaya—an allegorical tale of accumulating debt and disaster—plays out in the installation of the ‘Debeterinary,’ a collage of bureaucratic buildings—including a clinic and a tax office—which illustrates the violent ways in which capital will inevitably come to collect on those who, even generations late, are lumbered with debt.
“We treat language not merely as a system of predications but as a carrier of social relations,” the artists say. “We think that the very possibilities of thinking are pre-emptively predetermined by language. In particular by English as the language of hegemony; how it accustoms us to a particular way of talking, and therefore of seeing.” Therefore, the ways in which Freudian Typo uses intentionally seemingly illogical ideas – the continued evolution and reinterpretation of Tanner; Palmerston being represented through a cat; and the TRUTH AND RECONSOLIDATION typo in the centre of the space – create what the artists called “new semiotic opportunities. They tell me about the idea of symptomatic reading, a concept from Louis Althusser, the French structuralist philosopher. Symptomatic reading is described as the act of “reading the text not for what it’s really saying,” but instead focusing on what it is unable to say due to ideological and unconscious structures that suppress certain ideals from being explicitly represented. For Avarzamani and Ahadi, this meant looking at the story of The Old Woman and Her Pig and immediately asking fundamental questions of “where’s the money come from? Where is it going? What happens to capital?” The journey and transformation of capital creates a narrative that propels Freudian Typo – the initial nursery rhyme that opens the show; the minting of coins and cat food; the materiality behind the multiple meanings of Tanner all create different forms of commodities and currencies. This narrative arc is inevitably wound up in the remnants of imperial histories. “Although empire is technically gone in terms of its military formation, we do think that it endures systematically and materialises through the global and geopolitical relations of productions; spanning from construction, real estate, to the war industry, and multinational corporations, all sustained by the rhetoric and grammar of the English language.” Where imperial strength centuries ago was defined by an ability to conquer other nations through military might, its contemporary ghost can be seen through rhetorical flourishes, and the continued impulse to turn land into a site of economic value. On the day we sit down to talk in the empty cafe at the Hayward Gallery (it’s closed to the public on Mondays), the pavements are being ripped up and replaced outside of the building. “Just walking around the Hayward right now, you see a lot of construction going on. And construction is not only just developing and making the side-walks beautiful, but when capital gets stagnated it loses value, and they call it devaluation. So, to re-evaluate it, you need to find a way to deconstruct in order to reconstruct, make a better one, make a more beautiful one.” In the corner of the exhibition is a video piece that shows the slow-motion demolition of a building, Landscape of a Necessary Fix (2025), footage that shows the still violent method through which land is transformed into something more profitable for empire, challenging the rhetorical meaning of terms like reconstruction, reconsolidation, and reconciliation, which recur throughout the exhibition.
This idea is further embodied in Black Line and the Edifice (2025), which takes the black line of a Google Maps walking route that begins in the Hayward Gallery room where Freudian Typo is on display, and follows it to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), located in Canary Wharf; the black line representing two hours of walking through the capital from one institution to another. The EBRD is represented through a model of the building itself, here bathed in a striking red; a miniature financial institution housed within the walls of a cultural one, placed into a dialogue with one another. “We wanted to not exclude ourselves as artists, or this institution, from everything that we’re talking about. Because there is no way of extracting yourself and positioning yourself as only an observer of catastrophe,” the artists say; by placing the Hayward Gallery itself within the exhibition, they refuse the comfort of distancing themselves and their work from the ongoing evolution of empire. Palmerston himself, staring down Freudian Typo (2025), a variable message road sign that reads “TRUTH AND RECONSOLIDATION” is not just an observer of this centrepiece; his legacy – and the legacy of empire – surrounds him in everything from seemingly innocuous nursery rhymes, to video footage showing the slow-motion destruction of a building.
This central piece, the Freudian Typo that gives the exhibition its name, is designed to break the cyclical nature of the white cube space, something around which everything else orbits. The artists say that when reading the titles to the pieces “you can see that there’s irony and disorientation in all of them,” which is materialised in the road sign that “structurally binds these fragmented works together.” Even in talking about the development of the show, the central Freudian typo – which swaps out reconciliation for reconsolidation; turning the political idea of restorative justice and repairing damage done to indigenous communities into something more economic and imperial by using bureaucracy and rhetoric; the often hollow language of so-called post-conflict healing– seemed to force a double-take. “When we started talking about this word reconsolidation with our colleagues at Hayward, they were like, oh, you mean reconciliation?” The typo then, is designed not just to be a way of reconsidering the legacy of empire, but also something that asks audiences to consider not just what’s being said, but what can’t be spoken, with the Freudian typo “treating error and mistake as a site of resistance,” even if that means resisting the very words at the heart of the show; the artists emphasise their hope that these sly alterations on expected language will change the ways in which viewers regard the images, a transformation that can be both personal and political. They tell me “you’ve got to be able to say differently in order to see differently.”
Written by Sam Moore
