BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions

A cinematic adaptation of the video installation of the same name presented at the 2019 Venice Biennale, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions marks the directorial debut of African American artist Khalil Joseph. It is a bold and ever-evolving exploration of Black history, identity, and possibility, blending fictional and historical figures into an imaginative narrative of Blackness unfolding over 247 years, moving between continents and oceans. Conceived as a cinematic experience that mirrors the sonic textures of a musical album, the film moves fluidly across different registers, guided by its own associative logic. It interlaces personal memories, speculative storytelling, archival materials, YouTube clips, social media fragments, cinema, television, journalism, and citations of other artists’ works into an uninterrupted visual and sonic flow. In this act of collective narration—whose storyline intertwines W. E. B. Du Bois’s Encyclopedia Africana with the tale of a transatlantic Afrofuturist art biennial set aboard a cruise ship named Nautica—Joseph incorporates reflections by Black scholars and thinkers such as Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, and invites contributions from artists including Arthur Jafa and Garrett Bradley. A kind of living archive of Black collective memory and the history of the diaspora, the film, through its fusion of fiction and documentary, reveals the cultural complexity of Black presence across all living forms of the nation’s culture.