On bodies and their Stories: Najax’s journey of unveiling

"I had to learn, How to transform this body to something I alone own"— Najax Harun

Picture this: A table, its surface heavy with stoic, weighty books. Just beside it, another joyfully crowned with a vintage vinyl player. A third is scattered with palettes and brushes, gently cradling works still waiting to be finished. The walls around? They’re veiled in towering paintings, their figures gazing from the corners, like quiet sentinels. On the floor, empty canvases lie in a creative, beautiful chaos. And there, at the very heart of this vibrant universe, sliding to and from the player she calls “Soprano”, is the woman who brought it all to life — Najax Harun, both poet and painter. 

Born and brought up in Hargeisa, Somaliland, Najax’s, story is truly one of resilience, a touch of scepticism, and a profound act of radical self-creation. To really grasp the scale of her journey, we need to consider the post-war visual art landscape of Hargeisa – a place where visual expression had, for far too long, been limited to the purely practical: painted goods on storefronts, perhaps a few sketchy portraits. Creativity, you see, was stifled. Imagination struggled to escape the rigid confines of realism. 

“We were stuck. We had no place to start. But I wanted more,” Najax explains. 

From quite an early age, she felt a subtle detachment – a child constantly questioning things. When a schoolteacher spoke of where women “belonged”, the kitchen and the household, she found herself more confused than angry. “I couldn’t swallow it,” she recalls. Puberty only deepened this growing rift. She was told what she, now a woman, could and couldn’t do – “untouchable ways of life,” expected yet never truly explained. “I felt like a little girl trapped in a woman’s body,” she reveals. 

Necessity, as is often the case, sparks creation. Though her father, himself an artist, introduced her to visual work, Najax’s powerful urge to create came from deep within – a fundamental need to contain the awe, the alienation, and the derealisation she experienced. “I started doing this because no one else was. If there was someone else doing it, perhaps I would have pursued something else,” she ponders. 

Before she found expression in colour, she poured her thoughts into poetry. For her, colours and shapes are simply “the liquid and solid forms of poetry.” Sometimes, a painting might begin as a poem. Other times, the reverse occurs. This kind of fluidity deeply defines her artistic practice. 

Yet, she doesn’t see painting or any other medium as the end of all expressions. She complements her poems with paintings and imagines future works expanding to other mediums. “The things left untouched by poetry are accentuated in paintings. Those left by paintings are contained in literature and other forms,” she notes. “If a community sticks to only one or two mediums, their art is an amputated art,” she adds, elaborating on how the Somali art scene, ruthlessly dominated by metred poetry as the main source of artistic expression, makes her and other modern Somali artists who explore other mediums feel alienated. 

It is this alienation that leads to the lack of collaboration, resulting in a failure to attain a harmonic, multidisciplinary scene. “It is like we are trying to kindle a fire, each of us alone and on his own,” she explains. “A fire that could have transformed a lot, whose light could have reached farther and whose warmth could have lasted longer, had it been kindled together.” 

One of Najax’s recurring and vital themes is the internalised male gaze within Somali society. “It’s not just men. Somali women have internalised it, too – even when no man is present,” she says, her tone suggesting more weariness than bitterness. 

Her art directly challenges this gaze – the constant framing and reframing of the female body as an object, a symbol, or merely a vessel. In her visual world, the body is neither idealised nor overtly eroticised. It is, instead, courageously reclaimed. “It is human, simply human,” she declares. But reclaiming the Somali body doesn't mean a return to the innocence of the beginning. The figures of Najax carry marks of a lost elasticity, bite marks that are no longer cared for, and a recurring lack of distinctive elements. If names and facial features gave a fixed definition, her figures lack both. 

“The privilege of being seen as human is not a given for Somali women. I want to disrupt that,” she says, and she achieves this disruption not through spectacle, but through a profound kind of visual muteness. Her figures frequently gaze back at the viewer, stirring a subtle unease. They don’t scream, seduce, nor carry the “xikmad”, wisdom, we as Somalis often expect from a work of art. They simply exist – silent, unresolved, but then slowly, with time, you will see a slow unveiling, as if a curtain is being lifted from them. They slowly start showing you things you've already known but forgotten through normalisation. Issues you forgot were issues. Lives you no longer consider fully alive. Bodies whose true nature as bodies you became blind to. And looking back at their faces, you will, in inexplicable ways, hear them murmuring a question under their nonexistent breath. “What do you see, if your eyes are deceived?” 

At one exhibition, she thoughtfully placed a mirror right beside her work with that very question inscribed. That mirror perfectly reflects the very core of her practice in many ways. “I want you to feel the same silence you feel when standing in front of a mirror,” she states. 

One of her latest projects, Hagoogtir, meaning “unveiling” in Somali, embodies this entire philosophy. The work aims to strip away the cultural veils that reduce human beings, and particularly women, to predefined and often restrictive roles. Through twisted torsos, elongated limbs, and vibrant, vibrating colours, her paintings disturb the gaze by awakening parts of the memory that sit dormant under layers of conventional profiling. 

Colour, for Najax, is far more than just aesthetic; it's a deep well of emotional memory. Her reds speak of both blood and defiance. Her greens evoke the flags of early spirituality in the land, and her oranges are the sun, burning across generations, unrelenting. Even through abstraction, and against the claims of many who frame her works as “Westernised”, Najax’s palette undeniably breathes indigenous memories and identity. 

In Fresh Meat, a woman lies beside raw flesh, body next to body. The powerful themes of consumption and commodification undeniably hover. Is she prey? Is she protest? One may ask, but it is not clear. Najax doesn't paint answers, after all – only compelling silence. 

In Straight Path, suspended in a dark space by a straight line, a donkey covers the eyes of a distorted and seemingly fatigued human figure. Inspired by, according to Najax, the parallels between guiding a group of humans and leading a group of donkeys – a quiet critique of that “straight path” so often repeated it becomes a leash. 

And then, in Don’t Tell Hooyo (Mum), a violet figure, apple in hand, lies defiant and exposed. Upside down and open. Once framed, broken out, yet worried eyes whisper one single, crucial exception to this defiance: don’t tell mother. “Unapologetic to the world, but my mother,” she says, resonantly echoing the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish. 

Although her work has been showcased internationally – from a group show at the Goethe-Institut to her solo exhibition at Catinca Tabacaru in Romania, the HOY exhibition at the National Museum in Mogadishu, and appearances at BrushTuArt in Kenya, as well as venues from New York to Marrakech – its reception at home remains, at best, complex. 

“Although I do not seek validation from any given audience, either local or foreign, it is somehow sad to not reach the very people your works deeply reflect. So, yes, I would be excited to make a show in Hargeisa someday,” she confesses. Her early paintings, famously made on kafan – the white sheets used to wrap the dead – because she lacked suitable canvas, speak volumes about her determination. 

Among the youth, however, Najax stands as a clear beacon. Her admirers are mostly the younger generations, millennials and Gen Z, who discover in her work a mirror to their own experiences, a compelling challenge, and a powerful promise for the future. 

This fondness of the younger generation stems from, yes, her work as an artist, but also her nurturing nature towards anyone she sees trying to create something. Alongside her personal efforts to encourage, include and, sometimes, become the muse for many local artists, she is also a member of a collective effort called Fankeena, a cultural and artistic hub serving the Hargeisan youth with events, film fests, a library, a gallery and artistic mentorships, where she does her utter best to give back to the community. 

Najax gently reminds us that in a place saturated with oral expression, we might have, perhaps, become desensitised to words. Her silent unveiling and visual storytelling is an invitation – a deep, personal one – to truly observe the often-unseen frames imposed on life. Only then, she suggests, can we finally choose which to consciously keep, and which to courageously discard. 

And once more, in her own profound words: “What do you really see, if your eyes are deceived?”