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 of Western Christendom, imposed and made hegemonic globally. 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 illusionist 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, a clinic, and even a gallery. 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 The Moor of Venice (Othello) where the emblematic Jewish and Moor figures are both subjects to the same system of prosecution—visitors encounter a series of bureaucratic posters, images, and sculptures shaped by the financial (moral) grammar of Western Christendom. Within this horizon, where debt and finance gave rise to the lexicon of guilt, sin, and redemption, 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.

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.