1. Farang / فرنگ
فرنگ / Farang (in production, 2024) will be an installation of moving image and sculpture 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 Farang / فرنگ 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 consider the cognate overlaps between Hi8 film and the telegraph as communicative artefacts, their messages subject to codification, degradation and retransmission.
The work will be exhibited with GAMIS during Glasgow International Festival of Art 2024 and is part of The Ground is Not Unchanging, a wider collaborative project delivered by myself and GAMIS throughout 2024 that includes: curated film screenings, the GI installation, and experimental archiving workshops.
The development of the work is supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.