At Cultura Nova, Bonnefanten will present the impressive video installation BLKNWS by Kahlil Joseph (b. 1981, Seattle) in a special pop-up exhibition pavilion.

At Cultura Nova, Bonnefanten will present the impressive video installation BLKNWS by Kahlil Joseph (b. 1981, Seattle) in a special pop-up exhibition pavilion. Joseph is a Los Angeles-based American artist and filmmaker best known for his groundbreaking music videos for musicians such as Kendrick Lamar, Flying Lotus, FKA twigs and Beyoncé. Since 2015, he has also made a name for himself within the contemporary art scene with his large-scale video installations, at the intersection of cinema, fine art, fashion and music.

Practical

Entrance is free!
Opening hours Bonnefanten pop-up museum at Cultura Nova, 27 August - 5 September:

• Friday Augustus, 27: 19:00 - 22:00
• Monday to Friday: 14:00 - 22:00
• Saturday and Sunday: 12:00 - 22:00

The artwork

The film installation by Joseph consists of two flat screens, mounted side by side on a background in the form of a photo wallpaper. In doing so, Joseph realizes a 2 channel "news broadcast" in which the boundaries between art, journalism, entrepreneurship and cultural criticism are blurred; a critical analysis of how racial issues and storytelling collide with information systems.

'News broadcast'

BLKNWS explores the medium of film as a powerful collective experience that can be manipulated through its essential visual and auditory components. The staggering underdevelopment of the news medium format is exposed through a dynamic montage of film fragments from popular culture, archive material and filmed TV news fragments. Historical material is shown alongside simple images from our daily reality. Seen through Kahlil Joseph's lens, these images are steeped in 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 perspective accomplished by the split-screen technique polarizes the images used, fragmenting the story, and exposing 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 broadcast platform and an ongoing archive. Each edition of BLKNWS has a permanent, online connection to the artist's studio, enabling new content to be continuously received in real-time, creating an endlessly growing 'news broadcast' unique to each location where the work is shown.

Why this pop-up museum?

In recent years, the Bonnefanten has experimented with a temporary exhibition pavilion at the Pinkpop festival in Landgraaf. This successful experience, with between 6000-8000 visitors per edition, led to the ambition to expand the Bonnefanten pop-up activities. Thanks in part to BIS funding from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the Province of Limburg, Bonnefanten will be exhibiting for the first time with a pop-up museum at the Heerlen summer festival Cultura Nova in 2021. The museum aims to bring art to the public in an accessible way and to achieve cross-pollination on several levels: to provide a creative cultural impulse to festival-goers and curious visitors, and to create collaboration and an exchange of ideas with the organisation.