Moshtari Hilal is an artist, curator and author based in Hamburg. She is co-founder of the collective Afghan Visual Arts and History and the research project Curating Through Conflict with Care. Hilal was a fellow of Villa Serpentra 2023, the Young Academy of Arts in Berlin. Her essayistic debut "Hässlichkeit" was published by Hanser Verlag in September 2023 and was awarded the Hamburg Literature Prize 2023 for non-fiction. Hilal has already exhibited in Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Bonn, London, Peris New Delhi, Sport, Beirut and Tehran, among others.
In addition to her main medium, analogue drawing and collage, Moshtari Hilal considers her practice to be interdisciplinary. Her practice is characterised by (self-)portraits and informal (family-)archives, which she uses in an electric way in her search for a visual language. Her work deals with recurring motifs such as the prominent nose, black hair, the figure of the mother and unreliable childhood memories. Thus, the artist works with the drawn line as a means and symbol of a figurative vocabulary relating to the black-haired body, and with visual noise and low resolution as a method of accessing precarious material.