Clarissa Tossin (Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1973) combines sculpture, installation, video, performance, tapestry, and collaborative processes to address hidden narratives embedded in the built environment and in global flows of production and circulation. Through an investigative approach, her work examines the materiality of culture and the ways in which symbolic and economic exchanges shape identities, territories, and imaginaries—both locally and globally.
Raised in Brasília, Tossin developed an early interest in the implicit histories of architecture and urban planning, especially those that silence colonial violence or project myths of progress. Her work seeks to recontextualize these narratives by activating strategies of listening, displacement, and decolonization rooted in her own experience of migration. The artist thus proposes sensitive ways of questioning dominant structures and creating space for singular, often marginalized subjectivities.
In recent years, Tossin has focused on the enduring effects of colonialism on material culture. Her recent research also explores the contemporary space imaginary, interrogating discourses of off-planet colonization in the face of environmental collapse on Earth. In these works, she investigates the interconnection between space exploration, technology, ecology, and memory, using NASA imagery and disposable materials—such as Amazon shipping boxes—in tapestries produced on digital looms. This operation merges geopolitical critique, speculative fiction, and artisanal practices to challenge the cycles of extraction and consumption that shape the contemporary world.
Her recent solo exhibitions include Ponto Sem Retorno, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (2025); All That You Touch, You Change, Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, USA (2024); to take root among the stars, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, USA; Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los volcanes canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, USA; Falling From Earth, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, USA; Vulneravelmente Humano, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil (2023); Circumnavigation Towards Exhaustion, Kunsthalle Mulhouse, France (2021); Future Fossil, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, USA (2019); and Encontro das Águas, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, USA (2018).
In 2024, her work was included in the Whitney Biennial: Even Better Than the Real Thing, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA; and Prospect.6 Triennial: The Future is Present, The Harbinger is Home, New Orleans, USA. In 2023, she participated in the 14th Shanghai Biennale: Cosmos Cinema, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China; the 5th Chicago Architecture Biennial: This is a Rehearsal, Chicago Cultural Center, USA; and in 2021, in Born in Flames: Feminist Futures, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, USA. She also took part in Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, 2018) and in the 12th Gwangju Biennale (Gwangju, South Korea, 2018), among others. In 2017, she received a commission from the City of Los Angeles for the exhibition Condemned To Be Modern, part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA organized by the Getty Foundation.
Among the artist’s awards and fellowships are: Bulgari Whitney Biennial American Academy in Rome Fellowship (2025); Smithsonian Fellowship – National Air and Space Museum (2023); Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (2020); Andy Warhol Foundation through the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC); Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant to Artists; Fellows of Contemporary Art Fellowship (2019); and Artadia Los Angeles Award (2018); Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University (2017–2018), among others.
Her work is held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; New Orleans Museum of Art; and Casa Niemeyer – Universidade de Brasília.