Memories of Technicolor, 2022-2023

The ongoing series, 'Memories of Technicolor', was first exhibited at basis in Frankfurt and subsequently at Haus Coburg in Delmenhorst. It encompasses works that examine the family archive through the lens of VHS documentation and aesthetic considerations. Moshtari Hilal's self-portraits blend with those of her family. This represents an attempt to recall the formative years of her own past by appropriating the unreliable and chaotic archive that was inherited despite the adversity her family was exposed to, including the experiences of war and exile. The artist's family fled Afghanistan when she was only two years old, which has resulted in her memories of their flight and her first years of life becoming either blurred or only existing secondhand. One approach she takes in this examination is to focus on her own family recordings from the 1990s, as well as some footage from trips to Kabul after the NATO invasion in 2001. Hilal views the video cassettes as a point of departure for modifying the originals and reconstructing them into three chapters: nostalgia, fragmentation, and processing. The footage depicts a marriage, the artist's second birthday, a work promotion, trips home, New Year's Eve celebrations, family visits and the reenactment of flight as a game played by children. In doing so, she raises questions about how we engage with memories, including whether the perceptions of children correspond to those of adults and what factors shaped the recording. She also considers the extent to which documented material can portray the past, or whether it itself becomes the material for memories. In Memories in Technicolor, the artist reveals her personal memories, as blurry and colored landscapes, thus memories made in, and of, a past world tinted with the colours of a bygone technology.