Freudian Typo in conversation with Mohammad Salemy and Erin Li

Please note that this event has been cancelled.  

Join us to hear artist duo Freudian Typo (Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi) in conversation with art critic Mohammad Salemy, and Delfina Foundation Curator Erin Li.

The conversation will delve into Freudian Typo’s newly opened exhibition at Delfina Foundation, Condensed Word, Displaced Flesh, which unfolds debt not as a financial anomaly, but as a key element that forms the contemporary political economy. The exhibition highlights how historical systems of accumulation and coercion bind singular lives into perpetual debt, turning precarity into a universal human condition.

The speakers will engage in a discussion that comes to grips with the exhibition’s conceptual framework and mode of operation, its literary and historical references, and the broader critical questions it raises. The event will also offer space for audience questions and conversation.

If you wish to view the exhibition in advance of the talk, it will be open from midday and will remain open until 18:30.

BIOGRAPHIES

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. His Recent exhibitions include Shit Yes Academy at Ag Galerie (Tehran), Alibaba Conundrum at Griffin Art Projects (with Babak Golkar, Vancouver), as well as presentations at Milan Image Art (Italy), Tehran’s 8th Sculpture Biennial (Iran), Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Grunt Gallery, Richmond Art Gallery, Access Gallery, and Satellite Gallery (Canada), FWAR (USA), and Azad Art Gallery (Iran).

Currently he is presenting two solo exhibitions at Hayward Gallery and Delfina Foundation (London, UK – 2025), developed in collaboration with Ghazaleh Avarzamani.

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.

Ghazaleh Avarzamani (born in Tehran; lives and works between Toronto and London) works primarily in sculpture and installation. Avarzamani’s practice addresses the unsettling social hierarchies, often invisibly in place. Through her practice, she explores the fallacies and inequities in our inherited knowledge. By creating visual narratives that simultaneously deconstruct and reconstruct time and space, she aims to reconfigure materials to highlight dysfunctionality and failure. She reveals the extraordinary about the ordinary and seeks ways to disrupt the hegemonic systems of control.

Avarzamani holds an MFA from Central Saint Martins, London. Her work has been shown across a wide range of international venues, including the Dhaka Art Summit (2023), Aga Khan Museum (2021), MOCA Toronto (2021), Toronto Biennial (2022), Calgary Contemporary (2025), Rockefeller Foundation (2024), and Meet Factory (2023), among others.

Currently she is presenting two solo exhibitions at Hayward Gallery and Delfina Foundation (London, UK – 2025), developed in collaboration with Ali Ahadi.

Her work is in private and public collections, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Google, Rockefeller Centre, Arsenal Contemporary, MOCA Toronto, TD Art Collection and Red Mansion.

Mohammad Salemy is an independent Berlin-based artist, critic and curator from Canada. He holds a BFA from Emily Carr University and an MA in Critical Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia. He has shown his works in Ashkal Alwan’s Home Works 7 (Beirut, 2015), Witte de With (Rotterdam, 2015) and Robot Love (Eindhoven, 2018). His writings have been published in e-flux, Flash Art, Third Rail, Brooklyn Rail, Ocula, Arts of the Working Class and Spike. Salemy’s curatorial experiment For Machine Use Only was included in the 11th edition of Gwangju Biennale (2016). Together with a changing cast, he forms the artist collective Alphabet Collection. Salemy is the Organizer at The New Centre for Research & Practice. He has been the cofounding Organizer of The New Centre since 2014 and the editor-in-chief of its publishing arm, Triple Ampersand. He is also the editor of “For Machine Use Only: Contemplations on Algorithmic Epistemology” (&&&, 2016) and “Model is the Message: Incredible Machines Conference 2022” (&&&, 2023).