Clara Laila Abid Alsstar

Wells and fountains have always been places where people gather. This social aspect of the encounter is taken up and placed in a conceptual framework by the artist Clara Laila Abid Alsstar: She invites young people from St. Pölten to work with her. Since autumn 2023 she is meeting with Ebra Kocyigit, Yağmur Koçak, Aylin Ekşi, Deniz Kilic, Leyla, Ümmü, Malika Tatkhadzhieva and Helene Rimser. Together, they reinterpret the glasshouse of the Mevlana Mosque as a meeting place. Under the heading Leaking Stories, the loose alliance develops into a group. They confer, discussing how they, as young Muslims, relate to the subject of water and its many layers of meaning. Which aspects are important to them from their perspective? Which stories would they like to tell? Which current political issues should be visualised? How can individual and collective narratives be combined into a single work? And how can the element of water become that which it has always been, a place of meeting? 

The actors address these questions as equals and interweave the material produced during the process into an assemblage of audio elements, ceramic vessels and calligraphic drawings. The water in the plastic canisters, the water in the clay of the ceramics, the water in the ink of the pens: Here are stories that are like drops of water, escaping through a leak, slowly and steadily detaching themselves from the wealth of other stories and, if one looks and listens carefully enough, constantly developing and sounding slightly different. We thank Abdalla Bondok, Murat Katık, Eşim Karakuyu, the Mevlana Mosque, the Islamic Federation of St. Pölten and the Islamic Religious Community in Austria for their support in this project.  

Clara Laila Abid Alsstar (1990, Hamburg) works as a conceptual artist, art mediator and performs in spoken word. She is also part of the collective “Third Space: Disordering the Mess” and founded the duo “zum xten Mal” with Mako Sangmongkhon. Most recently, the two released their publication “Pause not Pose”. Clara Laila is also part of the committee of the art space FLORIDA Lothringer13. Clara Laila's practice focuses on the processing of situated knowledge and storytelling and the fictional moment in the narrative of memories. In doing so, she explores the question of how individual and family memories can be understood as part of an oral culture of memory in socio-cultural and socio-political entanglements and how these can emerge from the private into the public sphere, how their dividing lines can dissolve and how they can be deconstructed.