“Doctor, lawyer, engineer,” Armin Najib says, a sentence many of us from the region know a little too well. In households shaped by those expectations, it doesn’t arrive as advice so much as a pre-written script for what a future is supposed to look like long before there is any real space to question it or imagine something else.
Najib followed that framework, as many do, studying mechanical engineering and completing the degree not as a rejection of what he felt creatively, but as something that existed alongside it, a path that satisfied expectation while another direction remained present in the background, unresolved but persistent. “I studied mechanical engineering,” he says, “then I said I’m going to continue my art practices.”
Today he works as a contemporary jewellery and wearable art artist, and his solo exhibition RE-FLEKT, open at Double J Collective Gallery in Dubai Design District, brings that practice into focus through work that moves between sculpture, object, and body without settling into a fixed category. The pieces shift depending on proximity and use, existing as things to be worn, held, or encountered rather than simply observed. “There is no version two,” he tells MOJEH MEN. “I cannot remake it. I cannot repeat it.”
The exhibition itself is built across four interconnected bodies of work – Origins, Manifesto, Form, and Edge – each exploring a different relationship between material, structure, and use. Origins, formerly known as the cube series, sits furthest from conventional jewellery, made of objects that are not primarily designed to be worn and in some cases cannot be worn at all, functioning closer to constructed artefacts held together through systems involving glass and magnets rather than traditional settings. “Origins now,” he says, correcting himself mid-thought, “I used to call it cube series,” before adding that “they have glass, they have magnets, so you cannot wear it ordinary. They are collectibles.”
Manifesto moves into a different register again, which he describes not as a collection but as a space for expression, calling it “my private and social comments,” where small plastic toy animals are embedded within materials such as gold, silver, diamonds, and stainless steel. The tension between these elements is deliberate but not resolved into a fixed reading, and as he puts it, “if you look at them, you will kind of guess there is something happening,” without needing to define exactly what that something is.
Form brings the work closer to the body while still resisting conventional jewellery language, designed for use but never quite ordinary. “It’s more practical,” he says, “people can wear it every day,” before correcting the thought as he speaks it: “but they’re not very ordinary jewellery.” These pieces sit on the body in a way that changes how they are perceived, behaving less like accessories and more like objects that shift meaning through contact, and as he says, “they can play with them.”
Edge removes even more of the traditional language of value, working with non-precious materials like steel and plexiglass. “Mostly non-precious material,” he says, “steel, plexiglass,” where what remains is structure, movement, weight, and the tension between them when activated.
When worn, the work interrupts how the body is read rather than sitting silently on it, producing reactions that are immediate and public. “People come to you and ask: what is this you are wearing?” he says, describing how the pieces generate conversation not through explanation but through presence.
His process is defined by sustained repetition rather than pre-planned form, long hours at the bench where making becomes continuous to the point that time collapses into it. “I’m filing, sanding, casting,” he says, “non-stop behind my bench,” sometimes reaching moments where the work becomes total, “I couldn’t sleep for three days,” he adds, “I was just working,” and when something resolves, he doesn’t frame it emotionally but as completion: “after that I was like wow, I have it now.”
Some of the works remain with him permanently, which he refers to as self-portraits, though not in any literal sense, saying “there is few items I call my portraits, self-portraits,” before adding without softening it, “I’m a very narcissistic artist.” These are pieces designed not to be worn by others, existing as fixed points in his practice, unrepeatable by design: “these pieces, nobody can wear them,” and “I cannot do version two, I cannot replicate it.”
Years ago, a friend asks Najib to help clear out the studio of his uncle, a respected jeweller who had recently died. Najib agrees, expecting little more than the difficult, practical task that follows any loss. But the moment he opens the door, something shifts.
“I started crying immediately,” he says. “It was like he just stepped out. Everything was still there.”
The studio is preserved with an almost unbelievable level of care. Tools remain exactly where they were left, books are stacked in order, and every surface carries the presence of someone who had spent a lifetime building not only objects, but an entire world around the act of making. Nothing feels abandoned.
“It was so intact,” Najib says. “Like someone just left and will come back in five minutes.”
For someone already obsessed with material, process, and repetition, the experience became transformative. The studio showed him what devotion to a craft can look like when it extends beyond the work itself and into the rituals around it – the tools, the atmosphere, the systems that allow creation to happen day after day, year after year. “I started just learning,” he says. “By looking.”
That philosophy still defines the way he works now. His pieces are made entirely by hand, often across days of near-constant concentration. “I couldn’t sleep for three days,” he says of one ring. “I was drinking coffee and working behind my bench.” The process becomes almost physical in its intensity – filing, sanding, hammering, casting – until the object reaches a point where it finally feels resolved.
Some of those works stay with him for years. One piece, which he describes almost as a self-portrait, remained unsold long after collectors had asked about it. “I never sold it for four or five years,” he says. Eventually, it was acquired by a collector connected to Louis Vuitton in the region and later installed in Paris, though even there it resisted becoming a conventional jewellery object. “He made a box for it,” Najib says. “There is a little tweezer that holds it in the air.”
That tension between object, sculpture, and adornment sits at the centre of RE-FLEKT, Najib’s new solo exhibition at Double J Collective Gallery in Dubai Design District.
“People come to you and ask: what is this you are wearing?” he says.
The question matters because uncertainty is part of the experience. Many of the pieces are kinetic, interactive, or imposing in scale and structure. Some can barely be worn at all. Others alter the wearer’s awareness of their own body, shifting jewellery away from decoration and closer to confrontation, performance, or sculpture.
At the centre of it all is a question he keeps returning to: “Are you the viewer,” he says, pausing for a moment before continuing, “or are you the subject?”
