What's On the BLKNWS
What's On the BLKNWS
- Date
- Feb 20th 2025
- With
- Kahlil Joseph moderated by Viviana Medina
Kahlil Joseph’s debut feature, "BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions", lands in Berlin. His work defies easy categorization—melding avant-garde cinema, documentary, and popular media into a genre-fluid experience that resonates across art, film, and music. With BLKNWS, Joseph challenges conventional storytelling, weaving together a vast, living archive of cultural memory, visual history, and speculative thought.
In this panel, the director reflects on BLKNWS as both a cinematic event and an evolving media experiment—one that rethinks how history, identity, and aesthetics intersect in a hyper-mediated world. Known for collaborations with artists like Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar, Joseph has long worked at the crossroads of sound and image, crafting a body of work that interrogates the very nature of representation.
Drawing from decades of material—videos, photographs, songs, memes, and news clips—the film plays with the form of broadcast media, reconfiguring its language into something dynamic, fluid, and open-ended. Originally conceived as a multi-platform installation, BLKNWS premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2019, inviting audiences into a space where fact and fiction blur, history and speculation converge.
While the film honours the complexity of Black culture, its scope is expansive—engaging with the ways media constructs identity, archives shape collective memory, and the remix culture of our time challenges linear storytelling. With BLKNWS, Joseph offers an invitation: to listen, to see, and to imagine a new way of experiencing history in motion.
In this panel, the director reflects on BLKNWS as both a cinematic event and an evolving media experiment—one that rethinks how history, identity, and aesthetics intersect in a hyper-mediated world. Known for collaborations with artists like Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar, Joseph has long worked at the crossroads of sound and image, crafting a body of work that interrogates the very nature of representation.
Drawing from decades of material—videos, photographs, songs, memes, and news clips—the film plays with the form of broadcast media, reconfiguring its language into something dynamic, fluid, and open-ended. Originally conceived as a multi-platform installation, BLKNWS premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2019, inviting audiences into a space where fact and fiction blur, history and speculation converge.
While the film honours the complexity of Black culture, its scope is expansive—engaging with the ways media constructs identity, archives shape collective memory, and the remix culture of our time challenges linear storytelling. With BLKNWS, Joseph offers an invitation: to listen, to see, and to imagine a new way of experiencing history in motion.
Kahlil Joseph
The films and video installations of the filmmaker and artist challenge conventional linear narratives, using sound and music as materials to evoke lyricism and complexity. He first gained widespread recognition with his short film Until the Quiet Comes which won a Short Film Special Jury Award at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is a conceptual artwork that redefines how Black culture is experienced and communicated.
Viviana Medina
Viviana M. Medina studied directing at the Ernst Busch Academy in Berlin. Born in Havana and raised in Thuringia, she explores classism, Black visibility, and Eastern perspectives. She was an assistant director on Sam – Ein Sachse and developed a Netflix documentary concept. Her works BELOVED, C.V., and Say hi to me! explore identity and migration. In 2025, KUBA ORANGEN premiered at the Humboldt Forum and it explores the lives of Cuban contract workers in the GDR. Currently she is working on her debut film.