HASSAN HAJJAJ BRINGS FOUR ROCKSTARS INTO SOTHEBYS CAFE

13 July. Sotheby's Story Café Becomes a Tea Salon.

Hassan Hajjaj opens My London Rockstars, Ends to Estates at Sotheby's New Bond Street galleries on 13 July, and the show runs through 7 August in partnership with Vigo Gallery. Sotheby's Story Café, the ground floor room inside the Mayfair building, becomes one of Hajjaj's signature tea salons for the run, filled with portraits, patterned textiles and the recycled packaging he builds into frames. It is the artist's most personal chapter of the series yet, a homage to the city he has called home since he was twelve years old.

Hassan Hajjaj Frames Photographs With Cans of Harissa

Hajjaj builds his own frames, and the frames carry as much meaning as the portraits inside them. He arranges cans of harissa, spice jars and tins of tea leaves into repeating grids around each image, a pattern that echoes the geometry of Moroccan zellige tile. He learned the habit growing up in Larache, a fishing town on Morocco's Atlantic coast, where reusing packaging was simply how a household worked. Every can in the frame does two jobs. It holds the photograph in place, and it tells you where the artist is from, even when the sitter is a London rapper standing in front of a plain grey backdrop.

The Rockstars Series Started Two Decades Ago

My Rockstars began in the early 2000s as a portrait project among Hajjaj's own circle of friends, musicians and artists, photographed in clothing that mixes souk textiles with the street style of east and south London. The series has since traveled to AlUla, Marrakesh, Miami and Paris, restaged each time with a local cast rather than a fixed one. Finally Offline has tracked Sotheby's own taste for street level art before, including the four Virgil Abloh screen prints the house sold this month for a University of Wisconsin scholarship fund. London gets its own Rockstars edition now, and Hajjaj is using it to argue the capital's current creative scene deserves the same visual language he has spent twenty years building for Marrakesh.

These Sitters Are Not the Marrakesh Regulars

This edition swaps in a specific London cast: Central Cee, Clint419, Joy Crookes, Slawn, the Motherlan crew and Walid Labri. Central Cee brings the show's biggest streaming numbers, Joy Crookes its most acclaimed vocal, Clint419 its deepest fashion credibility through Corteiz, and Slawn its most active painting market. Hajjaj is not photographing any of them as celebrities. He dresses each sitter in his own patterned fabric and shoots them against the same flat color background he has used since the 1990s, which flattens the hierarchy between a chart topping rapper and a Moroccan grandmother, a trick he has used in every Rockstars sitting since the series began.

Larache Made Him Before Marrakesh Reclaimed Him

Hajjaj was born in 1961 in Larache and moved to London at twelve. He taught himself photography and design inside the city's club, hip hop and reggae scenes rather than in an art school, and he still splits his time between London and Marrakesh today. The market has caught up with the biography. Sotheby's sold his print Exchange in a 2020 sale and LV Posse in a 2019 auction of twentieth century Middle Eastern art, and Vogue commissioned him to shoot Billie Eilish for its March 2020 cover. He won the Sovereign Middle East and African Art Prize in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Victoria and Albert Museum's Jameel Prize in 2009.

Four Weeks Beats One Hammer Price

Putting Hajjaj in the café rather than the saleroom is a placement choice, not a demotion. A single auction lot tests what one collector will pay for one object, while a four week installation tests whether Sotheby's can make an entire room feel like Hajjaj's world, tea salon included. The same Mayfair calendar has room for smaller flexes too. Kith's Ronnie's brunch and lunch launch on Regent Street opened the same week in July, proof London's retail and gallery calendars are colliding this summer. Given that Hajjaj's prints already clear auction and his subjects already move culture on their own, the safer read is that Ends to Estates is the warm up for a proper selling show, not the whole story.