Clarisse Aïn graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris (2015) and the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2023). Her work takes as its starting point the narratives that certain communities construct in order to understand the world and attempt to find their place within it. She focuses on groups that are often modest or marginalized, and that develop alternative visions of history, society, or reality—whether rooted in spiritual legacies, contemporary beliefs, or informally transmitted popular narratives. Carried by ordinary individuals, these narratives exist in tension with dominant discourses and contribute to a proliferation of competing versions of the world. In their circulation, stories overlap, contradict, and intertwine, producing a surplus of narration characteristic of our time. Clarisse Aïn engages with this density of fiction as a material in its own right, using it to question the mechanisms of belief, doubt, and authority.
In her installations, remnants of pagan myths coexist with technocapitalist reflexes, while traditions, rumors, and contemporary imaginaries are transformed through their contact with the present. By combining sculpture, images, archives, and fiction, she constructs spaces in which these multiple narratives coexist without resolution. The exhibition space thus becomes a site of uncertainty, where the very conditions through which reality is constructed are put into play.
Her work has been the subject of several recent solo exhibitions, notably at the Palais des Beaux-Arts (2023) and the Maison Populaire de Montreuil (2024). She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2021–2022), the Fondation Pernod Ricard (2022), the KW Institute for Contemporary Art (2022), as well as Nuit Blanche in Montreuil (2024) and the Villa Belleville (2025). She is the recipient of the Prix de la Colle Noire de Dior (2021), through which she realized a permanent installation at the Château de la Colle Noire, and the Prix Weil Gotshal & Manges (2023). She will take part in the Salon de Montrouge (2026). In autumn 2026, DS Galerie will present “I’ll Put Sugar in Your Gas Tank”, Clarisse Aïn’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.