“Doctor, lawyer, engineer,” Armin Najib says are the career paths he was expected to pursue. This echoes across many regional households, arriving early like a pre-written outline. Najib followed that outline, as many do. He studied mechanical engineering and completed the degree not as a departure from what he felt creatively, but as something that ran alongside it – one path satisfying expectation, while another remained present, unresolved but persistent in the background. “I studied mechanical engineering,” he says, “then I said I’m going to continue my art practices.”
Today, Najib works as a contemporary jewellery and wearable art artist. His solo exhibition RE-FLEKT, now showing at Double J Collective Gallery in Dubai Design District, brings that practice into focus through objects that sit somewhere between sculpture, jewellery and body. Nothing here settles into a single definition; instead, the work changes depending on proximity, touch and presence, asking to be experienced rather than simply seen. “There is no version two,” he says. “I cannot remake it. I cannot repeat it.”
RE-FLEKT unfolds as a series of four interconnected bodies of work – Origins, Manifesto, Form and Edge – each one approaching material as something living, unstable and in constant negotiation with structure and use.
Origins, once known as the Cube series, sits furthest from traditional jewellery. These are constructed objects rather than adornment in any conventional sense, held together through systems of glass and magnets, existing as much as artefacts as they do wearable forms. “Origins now…” he says, correcting himself mid-thought, “I used to call it the Cube series.” Then, he continues almost matter-of-factly: “They have glass and they have magnets, so you cannot wear it ordinary. They are collectibles.”
If Origins feels removed from the body, Manifesto shifts closer. Najib describes it as “my private and social comments,” where small, plastic toy animals are embedded within gold, silver, diamonds and stainless steel. The materials do not resolve into harmony; instead, they sit in tension, holding multiple readings at once. “If you look at them,” he says, “you will kind of guess there is something happening” without needing to define exactly what that something is.
With Form, the work begins to meet the body more directly, though it never fully settles into the language of jewellery as ornament. These are pieces designed to be worn, yet they resist anything ordinary about wear. “It’s more practical,” he says. “People can wear it every day.” He pauses. “But they’re not very ordinary jewellery pieces.”
In Edge, the language of value dissolves further. Steel and plexiglass replace precious materials, shifting attention toward structure, weight and movement. “These are using mostly non-precious material,” he says. “For example steel and plexiglass.”
Worn in public, the work rarely goes unnoticed. It interrupts the familiar reading of the body, creating moments of curiosity that cannot be immediately resolved. “People come to you and ask: what is this you are wearing?” he says. For Najib, that question is not an aside – it is part of the work itself. His process unfolds through repetition and immersion, long hours at the bench where making becomes continuous, almost rhythmic, until time itself begins to blur.
“I’m filing, sanding, casting,” he says. “Non-stop behind my bench.” There are moments when that rhythm overtakes everything else. “I couldn’t sleep for three days,” he says. “I was just working,” and when something resolves, he doesn’t frame it emotionally but as completion: “After that I was like ‘wow’,” he says. “I have it now.”
Some works remain with him for years. He refers to them as self-portraits, though not in any literal sense – more as markers of state, process or presence. Then, 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,” he says, “nobody can wear them. I cannot do version two,” he adds. “I cannot replicate it.”
One such piece eventually leaves his studio after years, acquired by a collector connected to Louis Vuitton in the region and later installed in Paris. “I didn’t sell it for four or five years,” he says. “The buyer made a box for it,” Najib adds. “There is a little tweezer that holds it in the air.”
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. “I started just learning,” he says. “By looking.”
That sensibility carries through RE-FLEKT, now showing at Double J Collective Gallery in Dubai Design District. The works are made entirely by hand, through long, uninterrupted processes where repetition becomes language and language becomes form.
At its centre, the exhibition holds a question that never fully resolves, but instead continues to echo long after the work is seen. 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, “or are you the subject?” RE-FLEKT is on show at Double J Collective Gallery in Dubai Design District until 15 June. Learn more
