BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions

Honouring W.E.B. Du Bois’s unfinished Encyclopedia Africana, Kahlil Joseph expands his BLKNWS video project into a kaleidoscopic feature-length work blending encyclopaedic entries with music, memes and more.

Curator's Note
BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions expands on the ongoing BLKNWS project, first introduced in 2018 and presented at the Venice Biennale. Conceived as a form of "conceptual journalism," the work interrogates how news is constructed, circulated, and remembered.
The film extends this inquiry into a cinematic language, sampling across archives, media, and narrative forms to produce a work that exists between reportage and speculation, document and myth.

Structured like a music album, the film unfolds as a series of tracks, with collaborators functioning as a kind of band. Contributors include Saidiya Hartman, Anas Aremeyaw Anas, Arthur Jafa, Garrett Bradley, and Raven Jackson, among others, each shaping the film’s tonal and intellectual range.

Like the music that informs it, the film resists fixed categorisation. It moves fluidly between fiction and reality, assembling a fragmented but resonant portrait of Black life, history, and possibility.

Six years in the making, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions marks a significant evolution of the project, translating an installation-based practice into a feature-length cinematic form.

Kahlil Joseph (Guest Curator)