Born in 1994 in Tripoli — a Mediterranean city long associated with beauty, culture, and layered histories.
Maysoon Ben Naji is a Libyan artist, her work is rooted in memory, heritage, and the intimate rhythms of family life.
Her practice originates from her childhood in Libya, where the sonic landscape of Maluf and Muwashahat first cultivated her spiritual and rhythmic intuition. This foundational memory evolved into a physical pilgrimage; through her travels to Egypt and Tunisia where she witnessed firsthand the profound “Hadras” and the dervishes of Cairo, experiencing the ecstatic surrender that tames the body to free the soul.
From this lived observation, she expanded her inquiry into the philosophical legacies of Al-Andalus and the wider Sufi world, realizing that what unites every dervish across the globe is the singular movement of the “Whirl.” This rotation acts as a transformative shedding—a total stripping away of the material ego. It was her experience in Turkey, specifically at the historic Hodjapasha, that ultimately solidified her vision of the dervish as a state of complete, absolute submission.
In her work, this cosmic rotation is translated into a visual language where copper and pigment converge, redefining the canvas as a body in perpetual motion. Ben Naji invites the observer to participate in this “Universal Return,” where beginning and end unite in a visual dhikr that transcends all borders.
She often describes this period as one marked by a delicate balance between transcendence and grounding: a sense of spiritual elevation paired with an equally profound rootedness in lived experience.
This paradox of transcendence and rootedness continues to shape her artistic language.
It was during this inner transition that she named her artistic project “Sabeeli Art,” inspired by her daughter’s name, meaning “My Path.”
The project emerged as both a personal declaration and a spiritual continuation — a path informed by memory, motherhood, devotion, and creative awakening.
Through Sufi-inspired abstraction, she translates this philosophy into a contemporary visual language where layers, textures, and symbolic forms resonate with emotion and with the subtle, unseen currents of the soul. Each work becomes an invitation to contemplation — a quiet dialogue between the visible and the ineffable, between heritage and contemporary expression, between stillness and movement.
Sabeeli | Sufi Art by Maysoon — is not conceived simply as a project or a gallery, but as an evolving imprint: a contemporary spiritual voice emerging from Libyan soil, shaped by lived experience and carried forward through a sensibility that moves beyond geographic and temporal boundaries.