Scottish-Pakistani Tape Letters exhibition to open in Tramway’s Greater Govanhill Community Canvas space
The Tape Letters project shines a light on the use of audio cassette as a mode of long-distance communication by the Pakistani diaspora in Scotland between 1960–1980. Greater Govanhill is delighted to be showcasing stories from the Glasgow community in our Community Canvas space in Tramway opening this October.
Tape Letters | Photo by Miriam Ali
“My mum would listen to the tapes and tears would fall – she was always crying. Even when recording she would be crying. I’d get excited though. “Haan tape aayi!” [Alright! a tape has arrived!] It felt like a different feeling for us – a very emotional time. Emotional for her. Excitement for us.”
Aqsa Mohammed, from Glasgow, is talking about how it felt to receive and send audio cassettes to transport messages from Scotland to Pakistan and back. Tape Letters is a project which shines a light on the use of audio cassette as a mode of long-distance communication by the Pakistani diaspora in Scotland between 1960–1980.
We previously featured the Tape Letters project in Issue 13 of the magazine. And we’re delighted to say that we are hosting the Glasgow strand of the exhibition in the Greater Govanhill Community Canvas space of Tramway. The exhibition will open to the public on 13 October and run until 31 January. Along with the stories, it will feature the photographer or our regular contributor, Miriam Ali.
Read more about the Scotland part of project in our Tape Letters article here.
Drawing directly from both first-hand interviews carried out by the project team and the informal, intimate conversations recorded on cassettes themselves, the exhibitions showcase the experiences of members of Scotland’s Pakistani communities, exploring the topics of migration, identity, communication and language.
A pre-cursor to the modern-day voice-note, sending physical audio cassette recordings became popular amongst British-Pakistani communities in the 1960s, as a means of communicating with friends and relatives in Pakistan.
Faria Khan, from Glasgow, who contributed to the archive, said:
“Dad used to turn the cassette player on and test it and, you know, he’d bang on the mic saying “testing, testing”. It was just such an exciting thing preparing to record something! Like, what are we doing here? He’d then explain to us that it was a message for the family back home in Pakistan.”
The format offered a cheaper alternative to international telephone calls, whilst also providing a more accessible option for those unable to read or write letters. However, the practice has since remained largely unknown to many, even within British-Pakistani communities, with many original tapes lost or later recorded over.
A time when the telephone was communal, the tapes left room for intimacy in messages to loved ones. The exhibition also highlights the prominence of liberated female voices. It enabled the speaker to convey humour or capture disbelief, sing songs or speak poems aloud.
First launched in 2018, Tape Letters is a project by Modus Arts. It began weith Modus Arts Director, Wajid Yaseen, discovering his own family’s history of sending personalised cassette tapes to relatives.
Speaking about the project, he said:
“The Tape Letters project has turned out to be far more fruitful than I could have envisaged, and analysing the archive has felt akin to undertaking a sort of 'sonic archaeology' – a deep dive into a wide range of fields and themes, including memory studies, linguistics, migration, discrimination, communication technologies, class and socio-economic dynamics, and many others. Although it has become a surprisingly complex social history project, it primarily demonstrates the deep and inherent need for people to communicate with each other in whatever way they can, wherever they're originally from or wherever they find themselves in the world.”
Tape Letters Scotland Exhibition and event info
This autumn, the Scotland-wide edition of the project, Tape Letters Scotland, which launched in 2022, is hosting a series of three exhibitions at the Museum of Edinburgh, Tramway in Glasgow, and Dundee Central Library. The exhibitions will showcase the stories and experiences from 20 cassette tapes, and 80 oral histories, gathered from individuals and families living across Scotland’s central belt.
Community Canvas, Tramway: 13 Oct – 31 Jan
Museum of Edinburgh: 3 Oct – 23 Feb
Dundee Central Library: 22 Oct – 31 Dec
Public Talk: National Library of Scotland, George IV Bridge building: Tues 8 Oct 5-7pm
On 8 October, the National Library of Scotland will host a special public talk featuring Wajid Yaseen and Tape Letters Scotland Project Coordinator, Syma Ahmed, where audiences will be invited to hear first-hand from the project team about their work, and the importance of archiving and preserving migrant stories for present and future generations.