Seite - 86 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 01/01

86 | sigrid schade www.jrfm.eu 2015, 1/1, 75–88 forces occupying subjects and their bodies. In this way, This Is Your Messiah Speaking evokes the deeper meanings within the nexus of speech, exchange value, fetishism, the symbolic order (into which is inscribed a constitutive deficiency) and promises of salvation. This Is Your Messiah Speaking is one of frenkel’s works that has acquired a profu- sion of diverse connotations by being situated in a variety of public spaces, where each new architectural, mediatic, and social context altered the work in terms of both its representation and its reception. a video that is already inevitably perceived as a “media composite” is therefore amplified through constant new associations with other composites of media. in a text about her own trans-disciplinary practice, published in 2005 in an issue of the journal Intermédialités dedicated to the theme of re-mediation,30 frenkel lists the Messiah project as one of the chief examples of media migration in her work: in an overt sense, given the movement from one medium to another in the project, but also because the concepts and visual worlds, as they wander from performance to video to computer animation, through story-telling, photography, and printed image and text, and due to the multiple layering, irritatingly assume new meanings, and yet still resemble themselves, albeit in an uncanny resemblance. 31 her multimedia presentations make the interfaces, boundaries, and frameworks of the various media visible as such; she reveals their functioning as media, which ultimately means they function as a language that has to deny its medial quality in or- der to be perceived as natural. frenkel’s works of art explode the imaginary contract with which visual media bind their viewers to their content and also the naturalising character of speech and writing. Moreover, collectively her works reveal, as Marshall Mcluhan stated, that what appears in media are other media and, consequently, that what appears in media is also their own history. Understanding the history and func- tioning of media does not mean believing in its promises, but rather, as Vera frenkel says, recognising its unsettling effects:32 the articulation of words whose promises and mis-speaking continue to produce effects on the history of human societies, and the disastrous role repeatedly played in this respect by faith or hope in salvation. The idea of the endlessly postponed arrival of a messiah bearing happiness, salva- tion and abundance, and the assurance that want on earth can be eradicated both at will and instantaneously through consumption are combined in such a way by frenkel that this ostensibly simple message is transformed into a persistent irritation for the 30 see frenkel 2005, 149. 31 Frenkel 2005, 149: “Something survives; something changes, and forces of chance help to bind these elements into a new entity from which emanates the uncanniness of an apparent but indescribable family resemblance.” 32 Mcluhan 1964, 23: “This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.”