BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions with Filmmaker Kahlil Joseph

MoAD and SFMOMA present a screening of Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (110 minutes, 2025), followed by a post-screening discussion with Joseph and Key Jo Lee, MoAD’s chief of curatorial affairs and public programs.

Adapted from Joseph’s highly acclaimed video installation with a mix of fiction and documentary forms, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions interweaves archival materials and fictional and historical characters. It is an immersive story that spans 247 years across land and sea with passengers aboard the imaginary transatlantic liner “The Nautica.” Inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Saidiya Hartman, and others, it serves as a form of inventory of the collective memories of Black people.

The screening is presented in conjunction with MoAD’s five-week screening series Limitless. MoAD’s groundbreaking exhibition UNBOUND: Art, Blackness, and the Universe invites audiences to experience Blackness as expansive, limitless, and cosmic, reaching beyond the boundaries of Earth into space, time, and imagination.

In dialogue with the exhibition, the Limitless film series brings together award-winning films from across the African Diaspora, including the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, the Caribbean, French Guiana, Nigeria, and Zambia. Spanning narrative, documentary, and experimental work, these films explore speculative futures, ancestral memory, science fiction, African mythology, and visionary figures such as Octavia Butler and George Clinton.

Watch the trailer for BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions.

About the Speakers

Kahlil Joseph is an acclaimed artist and filmmaker known for his visionary approach to storytelling through film and video installations. Joseph began his career working for photographer Melodie McDaniel and director Terrence Malick. He first gained widespread recognition with his 2013 short film Until the Quiet Comes for musician Flying Lotus, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. His most ambitious and ongoing project is BLKNWS, a conceptual artwork and business that redefines how Black culture is experienced and communicated. Conceived as a continuous, curated broadcast, BLKNWS merges news clips, social media content, and cultural artifacts into a dynamic stream that reflects the richness of Black life. First showcased at the Venice Biennale in 2019, BLKNWS has since expanded into a networked platform, featuring satellite installations in barbershops, cafés, and community spaces. Joseph has also served as creative director for The Underground Museum. Founded in 2013 by his late brother Noah Davis, the Los Angeles independent art space and community hub is a pioneering venue for accessible and innovative exhibitions.

Key Jo Lee is chief of curatorial affairs and public programs at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), where she thinks with artists about Blackness, perception, cosmology, interior life, and the futures museums rarely know how to hold. With more than a decade in the field, her work lives at the intersection of curating, theory, and institution-building, asking how exhibitions do intellectual work and how care can be designed, not just declared. Her recent projects include UNBOUND: Art, Blackness, and the Universe and Liberatory Living: Protective Interiors and Radical Black Joy. Previously, she was associate curator of American Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She is the author of Perceptual Drift: Black Art and an Ethics of Looking, has written for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and holds dual MA and MPhil degrees in History of Art and African American Studies from Yale University.

Accessibility Information

Accessibility accommodations such as American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and assisted listening devices are available upon request ten business days in advance.

Please email publicengagement@sfmoma.org, and we will do our best to fulfill your request.
 

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Meaningful support is provided by Diana Nelson and John Atwater.