Ali Ahadi علی احدی

Freudian Typo

Freudian Typo is multimedia exhibition by the eponymous collective (Ali Ahadi and Ghazaleh Avarzamani), at the Hayward Gallery (UK).

The exhibition tackles on how the English language—entangled with the vocabulary of corporate finance, debt, and development—underpins the globally precarious state of land, bodies, and truth. It critiques Britain’s imperial past and how it manifests today, tracing connections between historical sources and current events in politics and finance.

Freudian Typo takes a critical look at age-old English nursery rhymes The Old Woman and Her Pig to unpack themes of debt, exploitation, and catastrophe. Drawing on archival research into these tales, the resulting exhibition sees the collective interpret a children’s fable through works that are full of puns and double meaning, revealing ongoing cycles of dispossession, accumulation, and re-possession. At its core, a hyper-realistic sculpture of Palmerston—the former resident Chief Mouser of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office—regards an electronic motorway sign which displays the phrase “Truth and Reconsolidation.” From here, the exhibition unfolds across a range of mediums including photography, sculpture, video, and found objects.

Photos: Rob Harris