This Summer, the Hayward Gallery, in partnership with the RC Foundation, Taiwan (R.O.C.), will present Freudian Typo: an exciting new collaboration between Iranian-Canadian artists Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi. The exhibition will comprise new work which playfully 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 like 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.
Intrigued by the cherished symbols of Britain’s post-Imperial institutions of state, Freudian Typo will also present a hyper-realistic sculpture of Palmerston – the former Chief Mouser of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The famous feline will regard an electronic motorway sign which displays the phrase ‘Truth and Reconsolidation’. From here, the exhibition will unfold across a range of mediums including photography, sculpture, video and found objects.
The third show of the RC Foundation Project Space Exhibition Series invites visitors to discover new voices from international artists as a key part of the Southbank Centre’s drive to create amazing cultural experiences for as many people as possible through an array of free programming. The Hayward Gallery’s HENI Project Space has offered free cultural experiences since 2007, with previously exhibited artists including Heecheon Kim, Amol K Patil, Thabiso Sekgala, Kate Cooper, Hicham Berrada and Huang Po-Chih.
Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi of Freudian Typo say:
We’re engaged in a mode of practice that maintains that art emerges through engagement with critical discourse, where dialogue and dialectics serve both as our methodology and medium. The complementary aspects of our work renders collaboration not merely as a beneficial addition but as an essential necessity. Our commitment to critical exchange defines our collective horizon, positioning the dynamic and discursive mode of art-making as the most compelling path forward.
Yung Ma, Senior Curator of the Hayward Gallery, says:
I am delighted that we will be once again working with the RC Foundation to present some of the most innovative artists from around the world to audiences in London. This exhibition by Freudian Typo will bring to the fore an artistic vision that dissects the structures of our world economy. It will be a timely and poignant portrayal that challenges a system we have all grown accustomed to.
Avarzamani and Ahadi will present a concurrent exhibition at the Delfina Foundation in London, where Avarzamani is a former artist resident.
Freudian Typo is curated by Hayward Gallery Assistant Curator, Thomas Sutton.
Freudian Typo, 10th Jun – 31st Aug 2025,
Hayward Gallery, HENI project Space
About the artists
Ghazaleh Avarzamani (born in Tehran, Iran; lives and works between Toronto and London) is an artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation. Ghazaleh Avarzamani’s research and fascination extend to the unsettling and revealing of social hierarchies, often invisibly in place. Through her practice, she explores the fallacies and inequities in our inherited knowledge and manuals. By creating visual narratives that simultaneously deconstruct and reconstruct time and space, she aims to reconfigure materials to highlight dysfunctionality and failure, utilizing collective human memory and knowledge that is often taken for granted. She reveals the extraordinary about the ordinary and seeks ways to represent the otherwise taken-for-granted. She frequently makes art in and about public space, utilizing signs and symbols familiar from everyday life as objects that demonstrate the norms, rules, and invisible structures.
She holds an MFA from Central Saint Martins, London. Avarzamani has exhibited at the Aga Khan Museum, MOCA Toronto, Dhaka Art Summit, Toronto Biennial and Frieze Sculpture Park among many and her works are held in collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Rockefeller Center, Arsenal Contemporary, MOCA Toronto, TD Art Collection, Google, Red Mansion and other private collection.
Ali Ahadi (born in Tehran, 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. His proposed protocol of abstraction calls for what he terms a “monster”: a triadic assemblage of incommensurable relations between the linguistic and the optical economies of the object, on the one hand, and the intervention of the Visitor— a linguistic conceptual persona devised by Ahadi—on the other.
Ahadi is an internationally exhibited artist. He 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 with a focus on continental philosophy and aesthetics from the University of British Columbia. He currently teaches in the UBC’s Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, where he previously received his MFA in visual arts in 2012.
About
Founded in 1995 by Rong Chuan Chen, RC Foundation has been a visionary force in promoting Taiwanese contemporary art on the global stage. An active champion in fostering cultural and artistic exchanges, RC Foundation has been supporting artists, curators and independent art spaces from Taiwan through grants and partnerships, both locally and internationally. These long-term relationships have nurtured and enriched numerous artistic projects from different perspectives, generating invaluable connections between Taiwan’s contemporary art practitioners and their global counterparts.
Since opening in 2007, the HENI Project Space at the Hayward Gallery has presented free exhibitions from a wide-ranging group of innovative international artists, including many UK premieres. Over the past 15 years, the HENI Project Space has served as a crucial portal of cross-cultural connection, featuring artists from five continents and over 40 different countries.
