Habiter l'interstice

L'Atelier 21 opens its autumn season with Habiter l'interstice (Inhabiting the Interstice), a solo exhibition by the Moroccan artist Safaa Erruas, on view in Casablanca from 29 September to 7 November 2026. The opening takes place on 29 September from 7pm. It is her fifth solo show with the gallery, which has followed her work since the duo exhibition Code/Barre with Jamila Lamrani in 2009 and published her first monograph, Le temps parcouru, in 2018 to mark twenty years of her career.

The new body of work pursues Erruas's long reflection on crossing, borders and the spaces of passage that separate as much as they connect. At its heart is the idea of the strait, understood both as a geographical territory and an interior one. In that in-between, the gallery writes, the interstice takes shape as a space by turns hostile and welcoming, somewhere one might learn to live.

True to her vocabulary, Erruas works with paper, cotton, pins, needles, fibreglass and metal wire. Parallelepipeds, ribbons of paper, interlacing lines and grids form compositions in which emptiness and fullness, shadow and light, accumulation and hollowing out answer one another. The critic Olivier Rachet, quoted by the gallery, reads these works as "cartographies de l'intime", cartographies of the intimate in which a fine thread seems to link straits and continents.

Born in Tétouan in 1976 and a graduate of the city's Institut National des Beaux-Arts in 1998, Erruas has spent more than two decades building a minimalist practice between drawing, installation and sculpture, dominated by white, a colour she associates with absence, silence, fragility and immateriality. The delicacy of her surfaces sits in constant tension with the potential violence of razor blades, needles and pins, in work that speaks of wounds, repair and disappearance without ever resorting to figuration.

Habiter l'interstice arrives at a moment when questions of passage and frontier weigh heavily on both shores of the Mediterranean. Erruas has shown at the Dakar and Havana biennials, at MoCADA in New York and at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, and her work is held by the Fondation Jean Paul Blachère, Les Abattoirs, Fondation H, the Centre for Contemporary Art Lagos, the MACAAL and Bank Al-Maghrib. This exhibition offers a chance to see how one of Morocco's most consistent artists turns a geography of separation into a quietly habitable space.