BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions

Celebrated artist and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph revisits and expands upon his eponymous two-channel “fugitive newscast” installation that was showcased at the 2019 Venice Biennale among other prestigious venues, in this galvanizing, shape-shifting exploration of Black history, identity, and possibility.

Joseph enlisted several prominent Black scholars and thinkers to co-write the film in an act of collective fabulation. Formally audacious and conceived as a cinematic experience that mirrors the sonic textures of an album, the film fluidly moves between modes, creating its own free-associative logic that mixes personal memoir, speculative narrative, archival footage, social media samples, and citations of work by other great artists (among them, a few notable Wavelengths alum).

Alongside original visual and auditory ideas, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is grounded in two parallel through lines. The first is the work of Pan-Africanist civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, particularly his unfinished Encyclopedia Africana. This updated, illustrated compendium intersects with the fictional story of a journalist reporting on an Afro-futurist transatlantic art biennale taking place aboard a cruise ship called The Nautica — a gesture that both evokes Marcus Garvey and his mythic Black Star Line and renders homage to painter Noah Davis and his Underground Museum.

Capaciously collating reflections from major Black intellectuals like Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, and with the participation of exceptional talent like Arthur Jafa, Garrett Bradley, Grace Wales Bonner, and cinematographer Bradford Young, among others, the film’s timeline spans 247 years, all-the-while interrogating the ways in which cinema — fiction and documentary — as well as media writ large, can be reclaimed as a crucial act of intervention, critique, even mischief.

ANDRÉA PICARD