KAHLIL JOSEPH
BLKNWS , 2019 Two-channel video installation, color, sound, with wallpaper Courtesy the Rosenkranz Collection Promised gift, Whitney Museum of American Art
BLKNWS (2019) is a video installation and a post-media company broadcasting from a Black perspective in a mixture of live and recorded material drawn from the history of recorded media mixed and re-mixed over time with a team of editors and journalists. With each installation site controlled remotely, BLKNWS updates the programs intermittently with its “fugitive broadcast.” Its fluid format folds the live responsiveness of TV news into a conceptual structure that blurs the lines between art, reporting, and cultural critique. The two channels fragment the collaged narrative into a complex composition of call and response, framing its linguistic form within a musical structure. Echoing the advent of the two turntable setup at the dawn of hip-hop, and putting things “in-the-mix,” two TV screens are hung side-by-side on wallpaper made from a single black-and- white archival photograph of a group of Black people, ancestors, most unnamed, staring back at the viewer. Here an image of Black cowboys in the American West is blown up to occupy the entire wall. This layered montage echoes the billboard-size black-and-white photographic collages of Romare Bearden and the photographic backdrops of the pioneering African American TV news station Black Journal, produced and hosted by filmmaker William Greaves, both created in the late 1960s. BLKNWS builds on this lineage, recalibrating the power structures of media and social space to make visible the vast complexity of Black experience.
Top: Installation view: Kahlil Joseph, BLKNWS , 2019, in Mountain / Time , Aspen Art Museum, 2022. Photo: Carter Seddon
Bottom: Kahlil Joseph, BLKNWS , 2019.Two screen video, color, sound, with wallpaper. Courtesy the artist and the Rosenkranz Collection
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