Kahlil Joseph, BLKNWS® (2018–ongoing). Two-channel video installation (continuously updated); photographic wallpaper. Installation detail: Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, CA, 2019. Image: courtesy Cantor Arts Center
Kahlil Joseph: BLKNWS®: MIT Edition
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Kahlil Joseph’s practice inhabits the space between cinema, memory, music, and visual art, challenging conventional narratives while opening new ways of thinking about history, identity, and contemporary Black life.
The artist’s landmark project, BLKNWS® (2018–ongoing), is an evolving platform that dissolves the boundaries between journalism, archive, cinema, and speculation. Treating news, history, and lived experience as parts of the same continuum, BLKNWS® operates as a “fugitive newscast”: content is continually edited and transmitted and varies depending on when and where it is seen. The project’s expanding forms have included, most recently, the acclaimed feature film BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (2025).
For MIT Future Fest, Joseph and the BLKNWS team have created a new edition of BLKNWS®, featuring conversations with members of the MIT community filmed on campus in August 2026. Bringing together scholars, scientists, artists, and thinkers from across the Institute, Joseph’s MIT Edition asks what it means to imagine the future from one of the world’s most consequential research communities, and what the intersection of Black intellectual life, technology, and cultural imagination looks like when given a platform at MIT.
BLKNWS®: MIT Edition is presented as part of the inaugural MIT Future Fest.
Kahlil Joseph (b. 1981, Seattle, WA) is an artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. He has had solo exhibitions at the New Museum, New York (2017); Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, the Netherlands (2017); McNay Art Museum, San Antonio (2016); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2015). BLKNWS® (2018–present) has been shown at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), the Sundance Film Festival (2020), and in Made in L.A. (2020), among numerous other places. Joseph’s feature directorial debut, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (2025), premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and screened at Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. Joseph is a 2017 Artadia Awardee and received the Grand Jury Prize for Short Films at Sundance in 2013.
Sponsors
Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Audrey & James Foster, Lucy Moon-Lim & Richard Lim, Cynthia & John Reed, and Idee German Schoenheimer.
General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Council for the Arts at MIT; Keeril Makan, Vice Provost for the Arts at MIT; Dean Hashim Sarkis and the MIT School of Architecture + Planning; the Mass Cultural Council; and many generous individual donors. The Advisory Board Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.
MIT Future Fest is produced by the MIT Museum with partners MIT Technology Review and MIT Morningside Academy for Design.
The Festival is presented by the MIT Office of the Provost, with support from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, MIT School of Engineering, MIT School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, MIT School of Science, and MIT Sloan School of Management.
The Festival is supported by The British International School of Boston, the City of Cambridge and Networking Sponsor AstraZeneca, as well as the Cambridge Office for Tourism.
Additional support is provided by the MIT Museum Corporate Members; at the Pioneer level: Takeda. At the Catalyst level: Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Amgen, Biogen, Bose, Google, Merck, MilliporeSigma, Murata, and the Russian School of Mathematics, with contribution from MITIMCo.