Soft Focus: Moderna Museet Malmö

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.

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.

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