The Address presents a still image of the typical backdrop for presidential television addresses in Pakistan on a monitor. Alongside this is a collection of nine photographs of ordinary people watching intently as the same image is broadcast on televisions throughout the city of Lahore. Depicted in trompe-l’oeil, the vacant backdrop features a hanging portrait of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founding leader after the partition and independence of British India in 1947. The passersby stop before the television and wait for some important pronouncement to be made, but no one comes to appear in the still image. Exposing the mechanics of political mass-media messaging, the work also comments on deferred political change and vague hopes for its arrival.
