Deborah Turbeville and Ikram Abdulkadir at Moderna Museet Malmö

Moderna Museet Malmö presents two concurrent exhibitions: Deborah Turbeville – Photocollage and Ikram Abdulkadir – Soft Focus, running from 2 May to 27 September. Both artists use fashion and portrait photography as a starting point but transcend commercial origins to explore presence, materiality, and the instability of the image. Turbeville, working between New York, Paris, and Mexico over four decades, developed a visual language of atmospheric resistance, using scratched, overexposed, and deliberately damaged prints. Her photocollages—cut, torn, pinned, and recombined—resist linear reading and hover between photograph, painting, and storyboard. Abdulkadir, based in Malmö, documents friends and family in everyday settings, building an archive of thousands of photographs that she continually revisits. Her work employs double exposure, overexposure, and saturated color to create intimacy while questioning fixity. Her focus on Black Muslim womanhood in Sweden raises issues of belonging and spirituality. Both artists reject the idea of fashion images as consumable, instead emphasizing atmosphere, duration, and ambiguity. The pairing highlights a generational continuity: Turbeville constructs distance through staging and material alteration, while Abdulkadir builds proximity through documentation and archival return. Together, they suggest photography is most powerful when it resists definition, opening a space where the image is shaped by memory, labour, and context.