What’s On the BLKNWS

With BLKNWS, Kahlil 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 the film plays with the form of broadcast media. Originally conceived as an 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.