Safaa Erruas: "Home Inside Out"

About

Safaa Erruas was born in 1976 in Tetouan, Morocco and graduated from the Institute of Fine Artsin Tetouan in 1998. Soon after her graduation, Erruas began a series of exhibitions, in and outside Morocco, by virtue of which many curators and collectors have discovered her. Since 1996 she has been exhibiting regularly in France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Norway, Algeria, India and United States. 

She participated in the Dak’Art Biennial in the 2002 and 2006, and the 25th Alexandria Biennial for Mediterranean countries in 2009, where her work entitled “The Moon Inside of Me” won the award of the Biennial. In 2015, the artist took part at the 12 th Biennial of Habana for the specific project “Beyond the Wall”. In 2016, her work entitled “Invisibles” is shown at the Musac Museum in Leon, Spain as part of the “Lucy’s Iris” exhibition. More recently, her last solo exhibition "Le Temps Parcouru" (Time Spent) showed in the last months of 2018, at Galerie 21 in Casablanca, Morocco. 

Safaa Erruas's work explores ideas of the body and borders through the meditative abstraction of visceral objects. In order to navigate notions of visibility and multiplicity through materiality, the artist often contrasts distinct sensibilities, materials, and textures. Senses of fragility and softness (cotton, paper, skin) can be found in tension with moments of resistance and sharpness (needles, wire, glass). She works generally on large sizes and designs white themed installation leaving light to underline the spaces.

'Home Inside Out', her first solo exhibition in the UK at 50 Golborne Gallery, focuses on how to place home in a state of migratory flux. Erruas’s meticulously delicate yet resilient pieces imagine skin as both a geographical border and symbolic barrier between our internal and external worlds. Memories are distilled into soft ruptures – itinerant movements into sharp meditations. In this search for belonging, Erruas creates physical manifestations of home where the inside goes out, individual collides with collective, and topographical gestures become intimate, narrative layers.