Hilal
YEAR
2022
LOCATION
Oman
Towards the sky
Hilāl (هلال), the Arabic word for “crescent,” refers to the first visible crescent moon following a new moon, marking the beginning of a new month in the Islamic calendar. This celestial event holds particular significance in Islamic tradition, as religious authorities use the sighting of the crescent moon to determine the start of Ramadan.
This project consists of a series of photosensitive sheets exposed directly to the sky and surrounding elements over the sands and dunes of the Omani desert during the first 15 nights of Ramadan—the Hilāl moon phase. These long-exposure impressions, captured between sunset and sunrise, forego conventional photographic tools such as cameras and lenses, instead recording only the precise portion of sky positioned above each sheet. Unlike traditional sky photography, which seeks to maximize field of view, Hilāl embraces an empirical approach, allowing each work to emerge organically from its unique environmental conditions.
Exposure times ranged from one to five hours, with each sheet developed, fixed, and washed on-site before sunrise. The absence of a camera renders the results inherently unpredictable—some sheets capture a sky void of stars, while others reveal celestial movement, faint traces of clouds, or the subtle impact of passing car lights, perhaps from a Bedouin family journeying through the desert. The resulting works exist beyond singular interpretation, engaging with abstraction as a conceptual framework rather than a stylistic choice.
As with Minelli’s earlier series, Silence Shapes and Paysage, the surrounding landscape plays a defining role in shaping the final outcome. Human intervention, environmental forces, and the ephemeral qualities of the night sky converge to create an evolving, reciprocal dialogue. The shifting position of the stars, the layering of sand carried by the wind, the residual marks of chemical emulsions—all interact in the formation of an “ideal” sky, where the waxing moon traces its path across time and space.
Throughout the process, the night itself becomes an unstable medium. At times, distant artificial lights blur the depths of darkness; at others, grains of sand settle onto the photosensitive sheets, erasing any trace of the nocturnal sky. Traditional technical concerns—sharpness, exposure control, depth of field—are rendered irrelevant. This is not photography in the conventional sense; rather, it is an attempt to render celestial phenomena without relying on iconographic representation, aligning with principles found in Islamic artistic traditions. Even the artist’s fingerprints, imprinted onto the emulsified surfaces while handling the sheets, are intentional gestures—what some might perceive as errors instead serve as metaphors for humanity’s enduring desire to “reach for the sky.” These traces embody a fragile yet profound act of seeking, a visual meditation on the human impulse to grasp higher meaning through gesture and touch.
Following weeks of extensive exploration—from the mountains to the coastline and deep into the desert, from Muscat to Salalah—the first 15 nights of Ramadan were selected as the project’s temporal framework, emphasizing both the spiritual and symbolic significance of the Hilāl phase.