Farang / فرنگ

Video still taken from the front of a red car driving towards a tunnel opening. Sandy coloured mountains loom overhead.

Video still, a close up of a woman’s hands drawing circles an egg in black charcoal. The woman wears a white dress with blue spots.

Video still of a television showing a graphic of Iran covered in dots emanating circular signals.

Video still of multi-coloured fluorescent lights in motion.

Video still, close up of herbs being sorted by hand.

Farang / فرنگ is an installation of moving image and sculpture by Mina Heydari-Waite that traces a semi-fictional journey across Iran. Using original family footage shot on trips to the country in the early 1990s, Mina combines a personal archive with source materials concerning 19th and early 20th century British presence in the region, reflecting on the interplay between familial histories and their wider socio-political frameworks.

Central to Farang / فرنگ are notions of historical synchronicity, serendipity and coincidence. Finding that her family’s route mapped onto that which was followed by the British Indo-European Telegraph Line – an administrative apparatus of the Empire which stretched across Iran for over fifty years – Mina considers the cognate overlaps between Hi8 film and the telegraph as communicative artefacts, their messages subject to codification, degradation and retransmission. This exhibition is part of The Ground is Not Unchanging, a wider collaborative project delivered by Mina and Offline throughout 2024 that also includes film screenings curated by the artist and experimental archiving workshops.