I met Hassan Hajjaj at a casual dinner given by Christa Clarke who was hosting a few guests at the occasion of the opening of two photographic exhibitions at the Newark museum: Hassan Hajjij ‘s My Rock Stars and Georges Osodi’s Royals & Regalia. The curator of African arts at the Newark museum, Christa Clarke is a staunch advocate of African contemporary art. She has put together a program of noteworthy exhibitions and is expanding the museum collection of contemporary African art in a significant way.

I had recently bought one of Hassan Hajjaj’s works from the My Rock Stars series – a decade long project where he stages and photographs his friends from the music world – and I was eager to meet him.  Hassan is not a man to easily categorize and that made him instantly appealing to me in addition to his warm smile and charisma!  His slightly disheveled look, beard, hair tied in a knot at the back of his head, marked face were all signs that suggested hard living which all added to make the mix intriguing.

While a Moroccan by birth, he speaks with a pronounced English accent, which surprised me since to my mind Morocco is more connected to France. I was soon to learn that he was born in Marrakech, and moved to London as a child. It was there that he was driven to create” his own village”; a community of culturally diverse and creative individuals where he could feel at home. Self-taught he learned by doing, delving along the years into the worlds of music, fashion and design. These rich and diverse professional experiences feed into Hassan’s current artistic practice, which includes photographic work and room installations (part pop-up nightclubs, part urban café)). He now splits his life between Marrakech and London.

Hassan is above all multicultural. His brand of multi-culturalism is Moroccan-infused. He rethinks cultural relationships and creates art works that reflect his idea of an inventive fusion where tradition meets the contemporary and cultures mingle to create a new vision that is essentially positive.

His photographic work at first glance falls into the tradition of African studio portraiture. Carefully staged, he poses his subjects – a variety of musicians such as well-known masters of Gnawa , a type of popular music inspired by African-Islamic spiritual songs to hijab-clad young women – against brightly patterned textiles, often with furnishings and clothes that he designs. Because of his experience with club culture, cat-walks and fashion shoots he makes the images look cool, sexy, his eye for fashion shaping the image into something dynamic and contemporary.

He breaks with tradition by moving “his studio” in the street and documents people moving in an outdoor setting. His Kesh Angel series of women bikers driving through the streets of Marrakech are truly novel and unique in the fusion of tradition and the contemporary, the Arabic and the Western world. At once cool and threatening, depending on which side of the cultural divide one is, these images challenge the female stereotype of both Western and Arabic cultures.

His frames are specific to each piece and are three dimensional incorporating serial arrangements of packaged goods labeled in Arabic. As Martin Barnes, chief curator of Photographs at the V& A says: “ By drawing attention to framing, Hajjaj makes the photograph inescapable as a physical object. It is not an impartial image to be read, opening like a window on the world. Rather, it is a partially-staged confection, derived from reality but ultimately a manipulated and recontextualised view point. “