John Akomfrah

John Akomfrah

Transfigured Night, 2013

Two-channel video installation, color, sound
26 min 31 sec

Transfigured Night investigates the disappointments and legacies of the African nations gaining their independence from colonial rule, in the aftermath of the Second World War. 'Verkärte Nacht' (Transfigured Night) is the most famous orchestral piece of Late Romanticist music. Composed in 1899 by the Austro-American composer Arnold Schoenberg, the one movement masterpiece was a sonic interpretation of a German poem of the same name by Richard Dehmel. Mirroring the five part structure of Schoenberg's piece and deploying several sampled reconstructed motifs from it, Transfigured Night is a twenty-six minute two screen piece on narcolepsy and the 'post colony'. Using original material shot in the 'anamorphic' format, the work comprises a range of moving and photographic images. In the poem, two lovers are out for a walk on a moonlit night; it's a moment of both intimacy and foreboding, of light (desire) and darkness (tragedy). During the walk, the woman confesses to her lover that she is pregnant by another man. Her lover pardons her unconditionally, thereby transfiguring the darkness and disaster of the night. Akomfrah is interested in both the music and poem for this piece. The poem can be read as an allegory of (colonial) independence. From the late fifties and throughout the sixties, usually at midnight, new African leaders mounted a podium on independence night to make a confession and a promise: they would usually confess they had inherited a not quite 'pure' new state machine. And would then promise to deliver (love) their new citizens to the land redemption. Cheering and clapping, the citizens would then unconditionally pledge their loyalty and love to the 'imperfect entity', thereby transfiguring the night of colonial bondage into a dawn of postcolonial freedom. The two-screen installation is about that moment of transfiguration, that moment of ecstatic affection. But it is also about the night after that night. And this is where Akomfrah's interest in the music comes in - an interest in the multiple mutations of these new states into what he calls 'narcoleptic' entities: symbolically alive at moments of celebration and festivity and chronically asleep when called upon to deliver anything else (health care, education, security).