PTV

January 17 - March 15, 2020 | Southern Exposure, San Francisco

PTV is an interactive installation that invites viewers to experience fragments of archived PTV (Pakistan Television Network) programming which originated in 1965.

Starting as a medium for state propaganda under Pakistan’s first military dictatorship, PTV monopolized the broadcast television landscape in Pakistan for the next four decades. PTV had a highly unusual trajectory; after its founding, PTV was nationalized, experienced periods of growth and expansion, transformed into a catalyst for conservative politics and the wave of Islamization under martial law, and then became liberalized in 2002 under Pakistan’s third military dictatorship. Organizing archived PTV videos into categories like news, sports, dramas, and music, this piece uses interactive technologies to explore this little known explosion of creativity in Pakistani popular culture, and gives the viewer agency in accessing this carefully archived footage.