Director Kahlil Joseph’s debut feature works to overcome the systems that contain Black art and possibility

Funmilayo Akechukwu in BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions.

Writing in Stolen Life , American cultural theorist and poet Fred Moten offers his concept of “fugitivity” as “a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed . . . it moves outside the intentions of the one who speaks and writes, moving outside their own adherence to the law and to propriety.”

A study of the social conditions of Black life, Moten’s work (along with that of several other Black artists, scholars and cultural practitioners) helps inform BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, the debut feature film from Los Angeles-based director Kahlil Joseph.

Terms & Conditions, an expansion of his groundbreaking, two-channel installation, BLKNWS , which was shown at the 2019 Venice Biennale, is dense, po