Moshtari Hilal is a visual artist, writer and curator based in Hamburg and Berlin.

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 by Hanser 2023. "Hässlichkeit" was awarded the Hamburg Literature Prize for non-fiction and was listed as one of the most beautiful German books by Stiftung Buchkunst. Hilal is a Villa Serpentara 2023 fellow at the Young Academy of Arts in Berlin, co-hosted by the Villa Massimo in Rome. 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". As part of ngbk Berlin Hilal co-curated the 2023 research symposium CCC (Curating Through Conflict with Care). 

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.