With a particular interest in analog drawing and collage, the artist and author 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.
In a walk through the exhibition Hilal responds to the FIRE-exhibition focusing on the theme of Apocalypse.
The exhibition FIRE engages with the origins of the term “apocalypse,” derived from the Greek Apokalypsis (ἀποκάλυψις), meaning “revealing” or “uncovering”. In this sense, the apocalypse is not a distant event but an ongoing condition. Beyond Western frameworks, Indigenous communities and other historically marginalized peoples have long used apocalyptic narratives to describe experiences of world-ending trauma, including colonization, displacement, and ecological devastation.
FIRE. From the Cosmos to the Commons at the St. Nikolai Memorial
Curated by Joanna Warsza, City Curator Hamburg
Exhibition: 21.6. – 21.9.2026
FIRE is the second exhibition in the City Curator series From the Cosmos to the Commons: Five Years – Five The series focuses on the elemental forces of Cosmos (2025), Fire (2026), Air (2027), Earth (2028), and Water (2029), dedicating one year to each. Together, they invite us to look toward the horizon of a planetary public sphere, guided by a sense of the "not-yet", a felt awareness of what might emerge. The project takes place at the St. Nikolai Memorial, a former church in the heart of Hamburg that was twice destroyed by fire during its history. Never rebuilt after World War II, it is now a site of remembrance and encounter, linking the memory of destruction and irreparable loss with hope and a collective will to repair. In this context, the contemporary artworks function as “unrehearsed encounters,” reflecting on how to break the cycle of destruction and renewal and move toward forms of planetary coexistence grounded in care, justice, and nonviolence.
