BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions: Kahlil Joseph’s captivating experiment explores the past, present and future of the Black experience

In BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, Kahlil Joseph invites the viewer to traverse the spectrum of Blackness; the catastrophe, ordeal, irony, humour, magnetism, vivacity, and continual metamorphosis of experiences specific to the disparate group of individuals who have come to find themselves tethered to the nebulous category of ‘Black’. Collapsing analogue archives into digital ones, the film surveys a mediascape in which entertainment, satire and surrealism are rarely separate from atrocity. Operating as a kind of news channel – or web browser, or mix tape – BLKNWS toys with the concept of ‘fake news’ in its exploration of the limitations and weaknesses of journalism, questioning reality and belief, while delighting in trickery and revisionism. With unbridled ambition and a rich arsenal of cultural references, Joseph explores the tension between perception and deception as it relates to Black connectivity and liberation.  

BLKNWS begins with the personal, introducing Joseph’s late brother, the figurative painter Noah Davis, and their father, Keven Davis, who both died prematurely of cancer. Keven once bequeathed his sons an Encyclopedia Africana, an unfinished editorial project initiated by civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois. The roving, inquisitive contents of this unrealised work provides a loose structure for the film. We begin at Keven’s brownstone on 121st and Lenox Avenue, the historic centre of the Harlem Renaissance, and return often to The Underground Museum, the subversive community art centre Noah founded in Los Angeles. BLKNWS extends far beyond this intimate setting, excavating and (re)imagining the rhizomatic breadth of Blackness past and present, while also expanding it via afro futurist elements. Though conceptually and aesthetically framed as a 24-hour news channel (evolving from an art installation that premiered at the 2019 Venice Biennale), the experiment’s format feels more like channel surfing than remaining on one cohesive feed. But why would anyone look away? Each segment is so captivating, from the transitory history of the Kuti family, to a portrayal of Du Bois’ disillusionment with life on the African continent. There are dozens of these highly stylised moments, taking the form of news reports, comedic interludes, historical reenactments and haunting archival relics and the quick succession in which they are presented can make for a dizzying watch.

One recurring vignette which moors the film is The Nautica, a Garvey-esque otherworldly fleet of sculptural vessels travelling between Africa, the Caribbean, Brazil, and parallel universe sites like ‘New Jamaica’, whose on-board encounters punctuate BLKNWS. It hosts both the cosmopolitan and artistically-inclined Black middle classes, as well as a Transatlantic Biennale – a mix of contemporary art from Africa and its diasporas, and artefacts being repatriated to the continent for the first time in a subplot that recalls Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024). All is not well in this speculative realm; beyond the hulls of The Nautica the ‘migrant crisis’ still abounds. In contrast to the real world, The Nautica is there to intervene where those supposedly bound by international maritime law often choose not to, rescuing and rehabilitating a group of Senegalese castaways, with Joseph presenting a universe that is parallel and aspirational (the fall of the British monarchy is broadcast for example), but not utopic or free from afropessimism. 

While the fictive biennale and close readings of museological space threaded throughout the film underline Joseph’s art-world connections, there is an equally frequent interrogation of the cinematic medium itself. From a Varda interview in which she expresses an absolute rejection of genre – setting the viewer up early on for the film’s refusal of categorisation – to the programming of a fictional cinematheque which screens Jean Rouch’s Petit à Petit (1971) alongside Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999). In one of these film-within-a-film sequences, a French New Wave work is mis-subtitled: its waif-like female leads enquire about anachronistic Wu-Tang vinyls and voice their disgust at Haiti having to pay reparations to France, speaking to the film’s persistent trickery and humour. Later, Nicholas Galanin’s 2021 installation Never Forget, in which Hollywood-sign-style letters spell out Indian Land, appears, alluding to the inherently complicit nature of the entertainment industrial complex, while extending Joseph’s acknowledgement of racial trauma beyond Blackness, placing it in conversation with Indigenous histories. 

Joseph’s use of moving image archives has an almost resurrective quality: the audience is addressed by a constellation of Black revolutionaries, from the lucid vivacity of Assata Shakur, who died in 2025, to the kinetic improvisations of Sun Ra. In one scene, the late, singularly pioneering Nigerian-born curator Okwui Enwezor materialises, delivering a lecture in which he states, “what is important is the space between the spectator and the work of art.” For 113 minutes Joseph’s BLKNWS transforms that space, crafting a portal to epistemological provocation and creative chaos of the best kind.

► BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is screening in select UK cinemas in January 2026.