Mina Heydari-Waite Selected Projects: ❶ فرنگ / Farang ❷ 33 seeds ❸ in sleep... ❹ Dreamlands ❺ Hamsafar ❻ The Showroom ❼ The Plaza ❽ Protect & Survive Community, facilitation & consultation work Info

فرنگ  / Farang (2024) is a moving image work 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.