Safaa Erruas was born in 1976 in Tétouan, Morocco where she lives and works. She initially enrolled for a science qualification at the University Abdelmalek Essaadi but later changed her course to artistic training at Institute National Des Beaux Arts where she graduated in 1998. Her work is often dominated by the single colour white which she says symbolises immateriality, silence and fragility. Delicate and powerful at the same time, her work is distinguished by the conjunction of fine and sharp materials: fabrics, cotton, paper, gauze, beads, but also needles, glass and razor blades together creating sutures, cuts, and seams like unhealed wounds. This is all the while managing to be abstract and minimalistic.
For a while Erruas’s work has focused on the complexity and permanent tensions between sensation, perception and experience which she feels is inexpressible with words or colour. She believes the absence of both in her work carries a neutrality of the her persona as the artist, which frees the viewer to interpret the metaphors according to their own sensibilities. For Erruas, work is a means to hide her sensibility to the horrors in the world which stems from the understanding that she does not have much power outside of her work.
Image courtesy of Artsy
Her first exhibition the Morocco Time exhibition, took place after her university graduation. It was organised by Jean-Louis Froment who is a founder of CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, a museum of modern arts based in Bordeaux, France. This is where Eraus also lived as an artist in residence for six months. She was a participant at the fifth and seventh Dakar Biennale in Senegal in 2002 and 2006 respectively walking away with an award at the latter. In 2009, she was selected as one of five significant female artists of the new generation of female artists in the Muslim world for a New York exhibition organised by the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts.
In 2016 and 2018, her work was exhibited in Paris as part of the Contemporary Art and Design Fair focused on Africa, Also Known As Africa at the Carreau du Temple. Erraus also participated in the annual exhibition fair devoted to contemporary art from the African continent in London, England in the year 2017. Erruas’s work is held in collections at the Moroccan Royal Palace, the Société Générale in Morocco, the Jean Paul Blachère Foundation in Apt, France, and the Center for contemporary art in Lagos, Nigeria. A recent exhibition she was a part of was the African Voices exhibition from February to May 2022 with fellow artists Mounir Fatmi, Maimouna Gerresi, and Kyle Weeks, in Milan, Italy.
