OSCAM x Kahlil Joseph x Bonnefanten x Patta x HipHopHuis present BLKNWS
What would the news look like if it was about black culture? Through the expo ‘BLKNWS’ by Kahlil Joseph, in collaboration with Bonnefanten, Patta and HipHopHuis we will take a critical look at information provision.
BLKNWS (black news) is an innovative project by Los Angeles based artist and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph. The installation consists of two flat screens placed side by side, mounted on a background in the form of a photo wallpaper. With this Kahlil Joseph realizes a 2 channel “news broadcast” in which the boundaries between art, journalism, entrepreneurship and cultural criticism blur; a critical analysis of how racial issues and storytelling collide with information systems. BLKNWS explores the medium of film as a powerful collective experience that can be manipulated through its essential visual and auditory components. By means of a dynamic montage of film clips from popular culture, archive material and filmed TV news clips, the staggering underdevelopment of the news medium format is exposed. Historical material is displayed alongside simple images from our daily reality. Seen through Kahlil Joseph’s lens, these images are permeated with an unusual perception of our contemporary society, which can be understood as the artist’s ethos, giving them a new life of meaning and reflection. The dichotomy effected by the split-screen technique polarizes the images used, fragmenting the story, and bringing into play both the poetic and political potential of the images.
In his conceptual approach to contemporary journalism and entrepreneurship, Kahlil Joseph sees BLKNWS as a work of art, a think tank, a global network, a broadcasting platform and an ongoing archive. Each edition of BLKNWS has a permanent, online connection to the artist’s studio, allowing for new content to be continuously received in real-time, creating an endlessly growing ‘news broadcast’ unique to each location where the work is displayed.