portrait of girl — Ikram Abdulkadir, Salma Cadeey, 2018 Photo: © Ikram Abdulkadir 2025 Bildupphovsrätt 2026

Ikram Abdulkadir

Soft Focus

2.5 – 27.9 2026

Malmö

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Friendship and sisterhood are central themes in Malmö-based photographer Ikram Abdulkadir’s work, in which she documents people and places close to her. She has described her photography as, at its core, being about the experience of living as a Black Muslim woman in Sweden, which she explores in her image series in relation to culture, politics, geography, and spirituality. She belongs to a younger generation of photographers working with lens-based art and moves freely between digital platforms, still and moving images, exhibitions, and different types of publications.

Ikram Abdulkadir (born 1995) began photographing in high school and published her images on the Instagram account @ikramianism, which quickly led to attention and several fashion and portrait commissions. Since her debut, she has had solo exhibitions in Malmö, Stockholm, Norrköping, and Copenhagen, and in the summer of 2023 she participated in the group exhibition “Søsterskap – Contemporary Nordic Photography” at the international photography festival Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, France. Ikram Abdulkadir is represented in the Moderna Museet Collection.

photo of woman — Ikram Abdulkadir, Self portrait (not part of the exhibition), 2026 © Ikram Abdulkadir Bildupphovsrätt 2026

photo of child — Ikram Abdulkadir, Bushra, Spångatan, 2023 © Ikram Abdulkadir Bildupphovsrätt 2026

For the exhibition “Soft Focus”, Abdulkadir has revisited her extensive archive, which today contains thousands of images, selecting both new and earlier works that play off one another and highlight central themes in her practice. In many of the motifs, we catch glimpses of family and friends, both at home and out in the city’s streets and squares. She uses a colour palette that ranges from muted greens, blues, and browns to stronger signature tones of red, pink, and purple. Technical experiments, such as double exposures and overexposures, are employed to make the motifs both enigmatic and compelling.

Curator: Anna Tellgren

A dialogue across generations

Moderna Museet Malmö presents two parallel exhibitions: “Deborah Turbeville – Photocollage” and “Ikram Abdulkadir – Soft Focus”. Installed side by side on Level 2, the exhibitions each take fashion and portrait photography as their point of departure. In both artists’ practices, people are at the centre – in images marked by presence, atmosphere, and a sense of timelessness.

In the encounter between Deborah Turbeville and Ikram Abdulkadir, both similarities and differences emerge. While Turbeville worked with staged environments and a deliberate aesthetic, Abdulkadir departs from the intimate and the everyday. At the same time, a shared sensibility becomes visible – a gaze that lingers, a resistance to fixed meanings, and a desire to make space for what otherwise remains unspoken. Both artists’ practices can be related to pictorialism, an early movement in art photography in which images are often softly focused and approach the painterly. In Turbeville’s work, this is evident in her manipulated photographs and photocollages; in Abdulkadir’s, in her way of working with colour, form, and light and shadow.

The exhibition is shown at Floor 2, New Gallery

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