With his publication "50 Years of Hip-Hop", released in 2022, the documentary photographer Yusuf Hassan has paved the way for a comprehensive representation of the history and development of the phenomenon, as the Museum Folkwang is now undertaking. The music genre, which emerged in the 1970s in the African American communities of the New York Bronx, has evolved into a globally influential subculture. Its identifying marks are baggy pants, colorful clothing, bandanas, and sneakers. Scratching and beat juggling, rapping and breakdancing, visually accompanied by graffiti art, serve as creative tools to artistically capture social, economic, and political realities in often neglected urban neighborhoods.

Building on the zine series "50 Years of Hip-Hop", the Folkwang exhibition features numerous other works that can be read as a commentary on Hip-Hop & Street Culture. For instance, Swiss artist Beat Streuli immerses us in his video "Fifth Avenue South. New York City 13, 7" (1994) right in the middle of a turbulent New York street, where subcultural life is bubbling. Paul Grund, a French photographer and professional skateboarder, is represented with the 81-part series "Blemishes": Grainy black-and-white photographs capture urban life on the streets of Los Angeles.

On behalf of the American hip-hop magazine "Vibe", the Dutch photographer Dana Lixenberg portrayed the two rival hip-hop icons Notorious B.I.G and TuPac Shakur in the 1990s: The Folkwang Museum pays tribute to the two rappers, who were shot during the violent clashes between their two record labels Bad Boy Entertainment (New York) and Death Row Records (Los Angeles).

With a large-scale photograph of a fully spray-painted subway car in the Warsaw subway, the exhibition also looks at protest culture in Europe. The image by Polish photographer Adam Lach is part of the "Archive of Public Protests".