Page 302 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

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Fig. 14.1. Gilbert Forson Art. Photograph by Birgit Meyer.

tion to the possibilities and limitations of new media technologies. This chapter
explores the question of changing practices of religious mediation through a
detailed investigation of the new public appearance of Pentecostalism in Ghana,
where this brand of Christianity has become increasingly present in the pub-
lic sphere since the turn to a democratic constitution which implied the liber-
alization and commercialization of hitherto state-controlled and state-owned
media.
What is at stake can be powerfully evoked by a signboard advertising the
shop of a roadside artist located at the Winneba-roundabout, Gilbert Forson
Art, which captured my immediate attention when my colleagues Peter Pels,
Marijke Steegstra, and myself passed through on our way from Elmina to Accra
in early January 2003. While driving along the bumpy road, I was trying to
sketch as poignantly as possible my research ¤ndings and thoughts on the ap-
parent convergence of Pentecostalism and audiovisual technologies, as well as
the dissonances arising when Christianity is processed through a video camera.
The image at the roadside condenses what, albeit in a less articulate and coherent
manner, is all over the place and forms the key concern of my research. It depicts
a young man, dressed in a yellow shirt, who holds a video camera in his left
hand without, however, looking through it, and, rather, I am tempted to say,
gazing at the sky in a trance-like state. The camera is placed in the middle of
the picture and directed toward an image of Jesus Christ, fair-colored with his
eyes closed and sunken in prayer, not willing to be disturbed, let alone to look
back. This somewhat old-fashioned image strongly evokes earlier traditions of
mediating Jesus through painting, a representation reminiscent of the image of

Impossible Representations 291