Outside it was cold and grey, a typical London winter’s evening, as the well-wrapped skaters enjoyed themselves dancing round on the ice of the skating rink and the cold wind blew up the River Thames.  Inside was the contrasting heat of Marrakesh, as Hassan Hajjaj’s exhibition ‘La Caravane’ came to a close.

In the historic Terrace Rooms overlooking the Embankment, with their 18^th century marble fireplaces and their chandeliers, British-Moroccan artist Hassan Hajjaj made the rooms look almost dowdy with his bright colourful fusion of contemporary cultures reflecting his semi-nomadic lifestyle and people he had met on his travels, two of whom were performing at the last evening of the show. 

The first in the Charles Russell Speechlys Terrace Room Series, which will bring contemporary art to the Terrace Rooms, and organised together with the Vigo Gallery, Hassan’s work combines a variety of influences:  Morrocan street culture framed with tins of what western civilisation has provided the people of Morocco, such as Pepsi, Coca Cola, tea and tinned pilchards, and the hidden power of women behind the hijab, who are as comfortable and powerful as any men on motorcycles, thus laying bare many of the common Western beliefs about women in African and Middle-Eastern cultures.