Moshtari Hilal
About the lecture
How can we start with the most obvious, the personal, the self, the subjective, and uncover complicated historical and material entanglements that ultimately lead to a better understanding of the outside world? I want to show how starting from the radically subjective allows us to move towards the political and contextual analysis that is often missing in canonical and standardised interpretations of the world. Within this methodological framework, I will present my process and the trajectories of my practice, moving from identity-driven questions, to self-portraits, to the concept of ugliness, and ultimately to the meaning of rubble.
Bio
Moshtari Hilal is a visual artist, writer and curator. Hilal studied Islamic Studies and Political Science with a focus on Gender and Decolonial Theory in Hamburg, Berlin and London. She is co-founder and co-curator of AVAH (Afghan Visual Arts and History) collective. Her essayistic debut "Hässlichkeit" (Ugliness) was published in 2023 and was translated into English and Italian. "Hässlichkeit" was awarded the Hamburg Literature Prize for non-fiction and was listed as one of the most beautiful German books by Stiftung Buchkunst. Together with political geographer Sinthujan Varatharajah, Hilal published 2024 at Wirklichkeit Books the book "Hierachies of Solidarity" and 2022 "English in Berlin - Exclusions in a Cosmopolitan Society".
With a particular interest in analog drawing and collage, Moshtari Hilal considers her overarching practice to be interdisciplinary and process-oriented. While her work begins with the personal and subjective as a resource and starting point, the process includes research, critique and collaborative or collective practice. Her practice is informed by (self-)portraits and informal archives, which she employs in eclectic ways in her search for a visual language from the fragmented cultural margins. Her work deals with recurring motifs, such as the prominent nose, black hair, the figure of the mother and unreliable childhood memories. She works with the drawn line as a means and symbol of a figurative vocabulary that refers to the black-haired body, as well as visual noise and low resolution, as a method to access precarious material.
