Everything is Different, Nothing has Changed

15 August - 23 November 2023

The first ever exhibition of sound art inspired by the amazing collections of oral history and archival audio held at Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives.

Dating back to 1962 and held on fragile cassettes and open reel audiotape, these recordings offer us tantalising fragments of the sonic past. For historians, they are especially valuable as intimate first-person accounts of daily lives. In this installation, the audio collections held at Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives are revisited by three sound artists - Alastair Levy, Emily Peasgood and Syma Tariq.

Produced in collaboration with researchers at Queen Mary, University of London and Birkbeck, University of London, who have been exploring what the East End meant to generations of migrants, Everything is different, nothing has changed uses archival audio to offer new interpretations of Tower Hamlets’ past, focussing particularly on the experiences of Jewish and Bengali/Bangladeshi migrants living here during the twentieth century.

Each artist in this show takes a different approach to the archive, but recurring themes of home, memory, dislocation and protest resonate across their work. Surprising, playful and reflective, they make magic with recorded sound, bringing the past and the present up close to one other.

Trailer for some of the sound exhibits at the exhibition.