Mohamed Amin Najim Exhibits in Essaouira: From Healing Bodies to Healing Glass
The space of Bab Marrakech in the city of Essaouira is hosting an exceptional artistic event until September 10, 2025, featuring the solo exhibition of physician and artist Mohamed Amin Najim. Titled “Mir War,” the exhibition evokes the dynamics of breakage and reflection and underscores the complex relationship between image, memory, and identity. The exhibition is not merely a display of artworks but aesthetic and intellectual endeavor that combines medical practice, with its precision and care, and artistic adventure, with its imagination and desire for transcendence.
The exhibition has seen a notable attendance from several critics and artists, including Mustafa Khalili, Mohamed Bouafif, and Ahmed Harrouz, alongside prominent institutional figures such as Rania Khouya, the Director of Culture in Essaouira, Ghiata Rabouli, Director of the House of Memory, and Tarik Al-Othmani, President of the Essaouira-Mogador Association. This significant presence provided the exhibition with a symbolic dimension and opened a rich debate on the role of contemporary art in valuing the architectural and human heritage of the city.
The Intersection of Medicine and Art
Mohamed Amin Najim belongs to a unique category of creators who traverse boundaries among knowledge fields, having practiced medicine while also venturing into fine arts. This fusion is not superficial, but rather constitutes the backbone of his experience, granting him precise tools to engage with artistic materials and imbuing his works with distinct sensitivity. In an internal dialogue, the artist addresses the recurring question: why did he choose glass and mirrors? He describes a beginning rooted in coincidence, linked to his cousin, who made and decorated mirrors, but this coincidence transformed into an enduring source of inspiration. An existential relationship thus blossomed between the artist and glass, reflecting the similarity between human fragility and glass’s susceptibility to breaking.
While glass shatters into useless fragments, the artist believes humans grow stronger and more mature with each fracture. Herein lies the philosophical dimension of his works: art as an attempt to reconstruct self and existence from the shards of breakage.
Glass as Body: From Biological Formation to Artistic Creation
Researcher in philosophy and arts Yassine Aglalo emphasizes that Najim’s experience represents a transition “from biological formation to artistic creation.” Glass, a sensitive material that combines solidity and fragility, mirrors the human body. The physician, accustomed to dealing with sick bodies, resurrects shattered glass in his studio, granting it new life, akin to a symbolic healing process: from illness to health, from death to life.
The fetal artwork, crafted from glass pieces, exemplifies this approach as the artist reconstructs the biological formation journey by assembling the glass shards piece by piece, alluding to the gradual growth of the fetus in the womb. Here, medicine meets art, science intertwines with imagination, in a rare creative unity.
Memory and the Mirror: The Dialectic of Reflection and Breakage
The exhibition, with its title “Mir War,” opens itself widely to interpretation. The mirror is not merely a reflective surface but a symbolic device that alludes to identity, belonging, and memory. The mirror reflects us but simultaneously fragments us, revealing our contradictions and confronting us with our inner breakages. Thus, the artwork transforms into a visual narrative about the collective self, the histories of cities like Essaouira, and the fragmented memory that the artist attempts to piece together through shards of glass.
French writer and journalist José Lenzini captured these dimensions when he likened Najim’s works to the practice of the great Muslim physician Al-Razi, who viewed the physician as a clear mirror reflecting the patient’s pain rather than his own disturbances. In this way, the artist, like the physician, becomes a mediator between breakage and healing, between darkness and light.
Essaouira’s Presence: The City as an Open Studio
The city of Essaouira is reflected in Najim’s works as an open stage or a collective workshop. The artist draws inspiration from the city’s ancient doors, the sea waves, and the argan trees, embodying them in glass artworks that celebrate local identity and the ecological environment of the city. Working outdoors, in public spaces, expresses a belief in cultural democracy, where art becomes an everyday action shared by citizens, rather than being restricted to elites. This connection to the city and public space solidifies the artist’s experience within the context of art that addresses environmental and societal issues.
Between Scientific Precision and Artistic Freedom
One prominent element in Najim’s works is their balance between geometric precision, derived from his scientific background, and the aesthetic freedom that art allows. Working with glass demands a mathematical and engineering sensibility, as small shards can only be arranged according to precise calculations. However, these calculations do not negate the poetic character of the work; they impart an additional dimension where scientific rigor meets artistic dreaming.
The Philosophical and Human Dimension
The exhibition transcends the visual aspect, entering a space of philosophical contemplation. The mirror here is not an individual mirror but a collective one reflecting Moroccan society in its transformations, its fractures, and its quest for a balanced identity. Each piece of glass is part of a larger image, and each breakage is a condition for rebuilding. From this standpoint, Mohamed Amin Najim’s experience represents a human metaphor regarding the potential to transform pain into beauty, rupture into unity, and breakage into maturity.
Biography: A Dual Pathway
Mohamed Amin Najim was born in Essaouira in 1996 to a modest family. He excelled in his studies, obtaining a baccalaureate in mathematical sciences in 2014, before enrolling in medical school, where he earned his doctorate in 2022. However, his scientific path did not divert him from his passion for fine arts, which has accompanied him since childhood, as he practiced drawing, poetry, and performance alongside his studies. His medical background did not serve as a barrier; rather, it uplifted his art, endowing him with a remarkable patience and precision when working with challenging materials like mirrors and glass. Through this dual path, he presents himself as a doctor-artist who employs science in the service of imagination and art in the service of life.
Najim’s Unique Experience Moves on Two Parallel Levels:
- Local Level: Drawing inspiration from Essaouira as an architectural, cultural, and environmental space.
- Universal Level: Raising profound questions about identity, memory, and the relationship between breakage and healing, between light and shadow.
In this regard, the artist offers a work that is readable within a specific Moroccan context while simultaneously opening up broader human questions concerning the fragility of existence and its capacity for renewal. Towards a Shared Mirror.
It can be said that Mohamed Amin Najim’s experience represents a model for a new generation of Moroccan artists who blend disciplines and believe that art is not a luxury, but an existential and epistemological necessity. The exhibition “Mir War” is merely the first step in a promising journey that combines the rigor of a physician and the dream of an artist. It is a declaration that breakage is not an end, but a beginning for a new formation, and that art is the path to making the shards a mirror reflecting our shared humanity.
