Ends to Estates | My London Rockstars

Opening hours | Wednesday - Sunday: 10am - 4pm (Last entry 3.30pm)

Ends to Estates marks the latest chapter of Hassan Hajjaj’s series, My Rockstars, an ongoing homage to 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 disciplines and genres.

Operating across photography, fashion, installation and design, Hajjaj has developed a distinctive visual language that fuses the aesthetics of North African street culture with pop art and global fashion imagery. His photographs are characterised by an exuberant melee of colours and patterns, with subjects often dressed in clothes that he has designed or styled himself.

With Ends to Estates, Hajjaj turns his attention to 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, and Central Cee, the UK’s biggest rap star.

Born in the Moroccan fishing town of Larache, Hajjaj moved to London with his family in 1973, aged 12. In 1983, Hajjaj opened a clothes shop in Covent Garden selling his own streetwear label, R.A.P. But instead of the naked individualism encouraged by the prime minister, he was only ever interested in fostering community. R.A.P. stood for “Real Artistic People” and the label, along with Hajjaj's own open and generous nature, positioned him amidst a burgeoning London creative scene.

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.

Now based full-time in Morocco, Hajjaj has returned to London with Ends to Estates to celebrate the wave of strikingly successful young creative figures that have made their way to prominence over recent years, many of them also the offspring of immigrant families.

Here is the director Walid Labri and the singer Joy Crookes. Here is Slawn dressed in a bomber jacket of Hajjaj’s mischievous design that appropriates the logos of Nike, Adidas and Louis Vuitton all in one garment. And here is Central Cee, photographed with his crew outside Jajjah, Hajjaj’s gallery-cum-tea salon in Marrakech.

What unites these figures is not simply success, but a shared capacity to traverse multiple territories, from local scenes to international visibility, underground culture to mainstream recognition. 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 exhibition title, Ends to Estates, pays good natured homage to their journeys from public housing to success and cultural cachet.

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.

Past exhibitions include: 

• HOW WE BUILD A HOME, by Lakwena Maciver, a vibrant new exhibition of cardboard and bead paintings.
• Push / Pull, by Lucienne O’Mara and Johnny Abrahams, a joint exhibition of new paintings by artists whose practices negotiate the interplay between control and order.
• Edenism, by Leonhard Hurzlmeier. Drawing from Medieval and Renaissance art, particularly Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, Hurzlmeier sees the Eden narrative as a metaphor for humanity's evolution from hunter-gatherer culture to civilisation.
• CRISPR @ 80, by Duncan MacAskill. Duncan MacAskill’s ongoing DNA paintings series which lies at the core of his practice.
  
• Haraz, by Ibrahim El-Salahi . Comprised of works from both El-Salahi's celebrated Tree series, many of which featured in his 2013 Tate Modern retrospective, and more recent Pain Relief works on paper and canvas, the exhibition reflects El-Salahi’s fascination with the Haraz tree, indigenous to Sudan.
• Prost, by Henry Krokatsis. The exhibition included an installation that transformed the interior space of Wellington Arch. In place of fine hardwoods, Krokatsis’ functional yet subversive remake of the floor used two tonnes of discarded material.
• Invincible Summer, by Erin Lawlor. The exhibition depicted snapshots of windows of time in the studio and come to encapsulate that peculiar life-drive that goes hand in hand with the hardest of times.
• In and Through, by Matthew Burrows. The exhibition included larger scale works by Matthew Burrows, the fruition of his In and Through series which he developed during the COVID pandemic.  
• Vertical Planes, by artist Jordy Kerwick. Vertical Planes is a playful reaction to history - or alternate histories - of Wellington Arch and some of the characters immortalised by it.
• Pain Relief, by artist Ibrahim El-Salahi. Work on display was created by the Sudanese Oxford-based artist between 2016-2018 from the comfort of an armchair when he refused to let physical restriction limit his ambition.