Tape Letters Scotland explores the rich history of previously undocumented communication between Scotland and Pakistan. Produced by Modus Arts, an organisation that works with sound installations across the UK, Tape Letters Scotland is an archival project that aims to uncover messages sent from Scottish Pakistani migrants to friends and family back home.
Speaking about his company’s work, Modus Arts’ director, Wajid Yaseen, says that the idea for the project came after he found recordings of his father’s voice when going through his possessions after his death. These recordings were messages on cassette tapes instead of traditional letters. Many Pakistani immigrants sent tape recordings of their voices to their relatives in the 1970s and 1980s, as some immigrants could not afford to make expensive international calls or write in their mother tongues – many of which have a written form that is not widely taught, or else they lack one entirely.
The Tape Letters project is an amazing feat of preservation, with discovered tapes being digitised, translated, and stored for anyone wanting to access them. However, the exhibition itself is a little underwhelming. Although Tape Letters is a UKwide heritage project with multiple venues across the country, all featuring local project contributors, the actual gallery space is underutilised and very few of the tapes themselves are available to visitors. The exhibition has an over-reliance on interviews taken contemporarily, which are about the tapes, contextualising a primary source that the visitor barely gets to interact with directly.
Although the Tramways exhibition’s format fails to give visitors a window into the oral history of Scottish Pakistanis, the archiving project itself cannot be faulted. It is a brilliant effort in preserving underrepresented oral history and has created a broad range of primary sources for future historians.
Tape Letters Scotland is at Glasgow’s Tramway until January 31st 2025 and Edinburgh’s City Arts Centre until February 23rd 2025.
Main Photo Credit: Miriam Ali
