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 - previous iterations have featured figures such as artists Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, jazz musician Yussef Dayes and restaurateur Mourad Mazouz.

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. 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.

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. And if, as the photographer Dorothea Lang once observed, every picture a photographer takes is a self-portrait, then My Rockstars is also a reflection of Hajjaj’s own story.

Born in the Moroccan fishing town of Larache, Hajjaj moved to London with his family in 1973, aged 12. He spoke little English and, struggling to keep up at school, dropped out at 15 with no qualifications. For much of the next decade, he scrambled for work during what was a particularly fraught period in modern British history. This was an era of widespread strikes and spiralling unemployment. During the so-called Winter of Discontent in 1978, homes went unheated, refuse lay piled up on the streets, and the dead were left unburied. Racial tensions rose to frightening proportions, with 36 racially motivated murders committed between 1976 and 1981. In response, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sought to create a culture of winner-takes-all entrepreneurialism. Hajjaj tried to navigate the precarious economy with resourcefulness Thatcher might well have admired. He sold second-hand clothes in Camden Market, promoted underground club nights and worked on film shoots. 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. His peers were pirate radio DJs, rappers, fashion designers and musicians like the bands Soul II Soul and the Young Disciples. Like him, they were children of immigrants who had 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. Where racial or ethnic difference once left you outside the mainstream, now it marked the terms by which a generation was reshaping the capital in its own image. As the cultural theorist Stuart Hall wrote at the time in describing the Black creative figures of the period, “Instinctively, they work across cultural boundaries and vocabularies. They work with and on ‘difference.’ But they do not have a binary, either/or, conception of it…They know that everyone comes from somewhere, speaks from some place, is multiply positioned.”

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 pictures in the series were taken over the past few years, when many of their subjects were only beginning their ascendency. The exhibition title, Ends to Estates, pays good natured homage to their journeys from public housing to success and cultural cachet. During the same period, Hajjaj has photographed many more conventionally famous figures, including the likes of Madonna and Billie Eilish. But 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.