Ikram Abdulkadirs's exhibition Soft Focus is now on view at Moderna Museet Malmö and will be on view through September 27.
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.
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.
Curator: Anna Tellgren
