Every artist in this exhibition started somewhere narrower than where they are today. Ismail Zaidy had a rooftop and a phone. Fatimazohra Serri had a rooftop and a domestic interior, in a city that didn't make space for much else. Hassan Hajjaj had decades of assumptions about how Moroccans should be photographed. Ali Maimoun had the weight of a tradition someone needed to carry forward.

In 2017, when a Samsung Galaxy S5 was the only camera he had, Zaidy turned the rooftop of his family home in Marrakech into a workspace, photographing his younger siblings in fabric and pastel light until the project, which he calls 3aila ("Family"), became something more deliberate. By 2018 it had a name; by 2020, a first solo exhibition at Hassan Hajjaj's Riad Yima in Marrakech. The work has stayed close to its origins ever since — built from what was already within reach, and pushing back, in the process, against construed notions of Morocco.

Serri's rooftop served a different function. Working largely in self-portraiture, she has used that space, along with the domestic interior of her home, to explore femininity, identity, and the body within an environment that doesn't always welcome the conversation. Where Zaidy's images read as tender, hers offer something more direct and symbol-laden — a different register of the same underlying inquiry both artists are asking: who gets to be visible, and on what terms.

For Hajjaj, it was the accumulated weight of how Moroccans had already been photographed, by other people, for western audiences, long before he picked up a camera. He spent the decades since countering it with his own images, building a body of work that ranges from Kesh Angels (2010), his best-known series placing veiled women on motorbikes inside his signature border of repeated tin cans, to My Rock Stars and My Maroc Stars, portraits of Moroccan musicians and designers staged with the same vibrant, pop-inflected eye. That visual language — one of the defining signatures of Moroccan pop art — has traveled to the Brooklyn Museum, the British Museum, and LACMA. In 2020, he photographed Billie Eilish for the cover of Vogue. For Between Rooftops, he curates alongside Atay Atelier, with a piece from his own archive on view.

Maimoun's inheritance runs deep. Considered one of the most emblematic figures of the Essaouira art movement, a community of self-taught Moroccan artists, he began as a stone mason before turning to wood carving and, eventually, painting — developing a visual language steeped in trance ceremonies, animism, and Moroccan oral traditions. He has described his own practice as a form of transmission, carrying customs and rituals forward. The work on view, drawn from El Fenn's collection, conjures genies, transfigured animals, and supernatural figures in a tightly unified palette.

Across all four practices, the same pattern surfaces: a constraint — architectural, perceptual, inherited — yielding, each time, something unconfined, built out of what looked, at first, like a limitation. Installed several stories above Soho, that expansiveness now overlooks a different skyline, inside Flute, the rooftop bar atop Broadwick Soho. The exhibition is part of a wider summer residency with El Fenn, the Marrakech hotel and longtime champion of Moroccan contemporary art, which reimagines the rooftop as an extension of its own celebrated terrace: bold stripes, suspended lanterns, and a program of Moroccan-inspired food, cocktails, and North African music running through the summer.