Join Wajid Yaseen of Tape Letters and Modus Arts as he provides an insight to this exciting oral history project. Attendees will also be invited to explore the virtual Tape Letters gallery.

The Event:

For this event we will start off with a presentation on Zoom to provide background information to the project. This will be followed by a visit to the online exhibition. We will then have a Q&A session with some contributors to the archive.

Tape Letters Project:

Tape Letters is an oral history project aiming to identify, collect and archive messages sent on cassette tape in the 1960s through to the 1980s by families who migrated to the UK from Pakistan between 1950 and 1970. The project seeks to unearth, archive and re/present a portrait of the cultural heritage of Punjabi (specifically Potwari dialect) speaking Pakistanis who settled in Britain, and will comment on family life via the informal and intimate conversations recorded and sent between families here (in the UK) and abroad. The recordings are a sonographic snapshot of the migratory experience and provide an insight into the early development of the British-Pakistani identity.

Website: www.tapeletters.com

Wajid Yaseen:

Wajid Yaseen is a Manchester-born, London-based artist whose work draws on an inter-disciplinary approach to develop sound-based works encompassing installations, live performances, acousmatic music, graphic scores, and sound sculptures. He is the director of the sound art research cooperative Modus Arts, the co-founder of the destructivist Scrapclub project, and director of the Ear Cinema project. He holds an MA in Arts and Design with a focus on Sonic Arts gained from Middlesex University, and his work has been exhibited and performed at the ICA Gallery, Arnolfini, Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Whitechapel Gallery, Laban, and the Freud Museum amongst others.

Website: www.wajidyaseen.com