This summer, the Moroccan British artist Hassan Hajjaj brings his uniquely visual world to Sotheby’s in London with a selling exhibition and a takeover of Sotheby’s Story Café on New Bond Street.
On view from 13 July to 7 August 2026, Hassan Hajjaj: My London Rockstars, Ends to Estates is Hajjaj’s personal homage to the city and its stars and marks the latest chapter of his My Rockstars series, an ongoing project focusing on the figures that make up the artist’s global community of friends and fellow artists. Initiated in the early 2000s, the project has evolved into an expansive visual archive of contemporary creativity, reflecting Hajjaj’s instinct for bringing together individuals working across multiple creative disciplines and genres.
Hajjaj will also transform Sotheby’s café with an immersive takeover in his signature style – in keeping with his vibrant cafés and tea salons, primarily in Marrakech and Paris.
“I am so proud to introduce this new creative energy in London, which mirrors the spirit and excitement of my early days in the city.”
Hassan Hajjaj
Operating across photography, fashion, installation and design, Hajjaj – who is now based full-time in Morocco – has developed a distinctive visual language that fuses the aesthetics of North African street culture with pop art and global fashion imagery. Shot in Marrakech, London or anywhere he can improvise a studio location by pinning a patterned textile to a wall, Hajjaj’s photographs are characterised by an exuberant melee of colours and patterns, with subjects often dressed in clothes that he has designed or styled himself. Referencing everything from pop music videos and luxury branding to the legacy of African studio portrait photography, Hajjaj’s imagery captures the energy of communities shaped by migration, creativity and exchange.
Hassan Hajjaj: My London Rockstars, Ends to Estates celebrates the wave of strikingly successful young creative figures that have made their way to prominence over recent years. Spotlighting an ascendent generation of cultural figures shaping London’s contemporary landscape, the series includes portraits of artists, musicians and designers whose practices reflect the city’s evolving intersections of fashion, music and visual culture, including painter Slawn Olaolu; fashion designer Clint 419; Central Cee, the UK’s biggest drill & hip-hop star; director Walid Labrim, and singer Joy Crookes.
Uniting all these figures is a shared capacity to traverse multiple territories, from local scenes to international visibility, underground culture to mainstream recognition.
Curator, writer and broadcaster, Ekow Eshun comments: “Hajjaj recognises in them the same resourcefulness and hybridity that shaped his own trajectory. His portraits are acts of affirmation; images that insist multiculturalism continues to be one of London’s greatest creative forces.”
The pictures in the series were taken over the past few years, when many of their subjects were only beginning their ascendency. The exhibition title pays homage to their journeys from public housing to success and cultural cachet.
Despite photographing many more conventionally famous figures, including the likes of Madonna and Billie Eilish, Eshun notes that “…it’s a measure of his personal outlook, his commitment to friends and kin, that he saves the term “Rock Star” only for those he feels a real affinity with – the “My” in the series title does as much heavy lifting as the appellation itself. Seen together, the works in Ends to Estates celebrate a city continually in the process of being remade. In Hajjaj’s hands, London emerges as a place where difference generates style, solidarity and new forms of cultural expression. And where community itself becomes a form of artistic practice.”
Born in the Moroccan fishing town of Larache, Hajjaj moved to London with his family in 1973, aged 12. He spoke no English and, struggling to keep up at school, dropped out at 15 with no qualifications. For much of the next decade, he scrabbled for work during what was a particularly fraught period in modern British history, an era of widespread strikes and spiralling unemployment.
In response, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sought to create a culture of winner-takes-all entrepreneurialism. Hajjaj tried to navigate the precarious economy, selling second-hand clothes in Camden market, promoting underground club nights and working on film shoots. In 1984, he opened a clothes shop in Covent Garden selling his own streetwear label, R.A.P. (“Real Artistic People”).
Only ever interested in fostering community, Hajjaj – with his open and generous nature – found himself positioned amidst a burgeoning London creative scene. His peers were pirate radio DJs, rappers, fashion designers and musicians such as the bands Soul II Soul and the Young Disciples. Together, they turned to culture and creativity as a retreat from, and a riposte to, the racial hostilities and harsh capitalist ethos of the era.
Their ascendence signalled the emergence of a new, diverse London, a city whose creative dynamism was fuelled by the multiple viewpoints and cultural inheritances of its cosmopolitan population, and a generation reshaping the capital in its own image.
Hajjaj began to practice as an artist in the mid-1990s. Since then, his gaze has remained fixed on figures that, like him, can lay claim to a hybrid cultural identity and who, as a consequence, navigate the world from the perspective of insider and outsider at the same time.
Works by Hassan Hajjaj can be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA; Newark Museum, New Jersey USA; LACMA: Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA; Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK; Farjam Collection, Dubai, UAE; ICI: Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris, France; Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi, UAE; Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Tunisia; MAXXI: Museum of Arts of the XXI century, Rome, Italy; MACAAL: Musée d’Art Contemporain Africain Al Maaden, Marrakesh, Morocco; NGV: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, and more.
Press release from Sotheby’s and Vigo Gallery
Image: Hassan Hajjaj. Atlantic Johnson. 2023. Framed photography. Image courtesy of Atlantic Johnson, Vigo Gallery, London and Hassan Hajjaj Studio © Hassan Hajjaj
