فرنگ  / Farang (2024) is a moving image work 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, the project combines a personal British-Iranian 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 فرنگ / Farang are notions of historical synchronicity, serendipity and coincidence. Finding that my family’s route mapped onto that which was followed by the British Indo-European Telegraph Line – an administrative apparatus of Empire which stretched across Iran for over fifty years – the work considers the cognate overlaps between Hi8 film and the telegraph as communicative artefacts, their messages subject to codification, degradation and retransmission.” - Mina Heydari-Waite

The work was exhibited in a solo sculptural installation with Offline during Glasgow International Festival of Art 2024 (6th-23rd June 2024). Materials list: single channel projection, 7-channel sound, cable, aluminium, speakers, voile, clay plaster, black stoneware, rosewater, rose petals, fan, fountain pump. The exhibition was part of The Ground is Not Unchanging, was a wider collaborative project delivered by Mina Heydari-Waite and Offline throughout 2024 that included: curated film screenings, the GI installation, and experimental archiving workshops.