Photo essay: Ikram Abdulkadir’s Soft Focus
The Swedish-Somali photographer’s first hometown exhibition is an intimate celebration of family and community
Printed on a wall at the Moderna Museet Malmö, a statement by the Swedish-Somali photographer Ikram Abdulkadir reads: “It is Swedish. It is contemporary Swedish art, and it will always be part of Swedish art history.”
Themes of friendship and sisterhood lie at the heart of Soft Focus, a collection of gauzy and intimate photographs of family and friends, on show until 27 September. With a recent exhibition at the Nils Staerk gallery in Denmark, commissions from Vogue Scandinavia, Nike and Sony Music under her belt, Abdulkadir’s work is finding new audiences and receiving widespread acclaim.
“Now, the place that I’m at in my career, it’s a bit of a struggle to take the photo, or to post it,” she says.
”Before I just was running around, like a weirdo with a camera. No one knew where it was ending up. But now my sister’s face is on the bus stop.”
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Soft Focus is Abdulkadir’s first solo exhibition in her hometown of Malmö. It brings together photographs made over the past decade and is the result of hours sorting through the thousands of images in her archive alongside Moderna Museet curator Anna Tellgren. As a young Black Muslim woman working in Sweden, the show carries particular significance.
“I get asked things like, ‘What’s your thinking behind photographing Black women?’” says Abdulkadir, 30. “I photograph them because I want to. What else am I supposed to photograph? It’s my family. My friends. My community.”
Without formal training in photography, Abdulkadir embraces experimentation. In line with the exhibition’s title, the images she presents in Soft Focus include double exposures, blurred frames and compositions that play with light and shadow. She isn’t afraid of failure and sees pushing photographic boundaries as a crucial part of her process.
“I’m learning. I’m curious about the medium,” she says. “My process has been really intuitive. Does this feel good? Does it look good? Is it good? And then just going with that. I didn’t have the cultural capital that a lot of white artists have, or the social capital. So it’s been a lot of pretending in a way.”
In one striking image, Abdulkadir’s sister Salma stands alone in the middle of a road, fog behind her, wrapped in a purple embroidered garbasaar. “I think she’s really beautiful,” she says. “When you photograph her, she holds your gaze. She doesn’t look away.”
Abdulkadir lost her younger brother Hassan in 2023, a pivotal moment in her life and art. She says: “After he died, I found myself looking through photographs and thinking, I wish I had taken more. I wish I’d insisted more. I wish I’d documented more. It made photographing my family feel more urgent. More important.”
Growing up Muslim has shaped Abdulkadir’s thinking around death.
“Growing up, we’re taught that life is temporary. We’re aware of death in an abstract way,” she says. “But it’s different when you actually have to come to terms with it. That’s when the reality of impermanence arrives. Photography became tied to that. Not just preserving people, but preserving evidence that we were here at all.”
For Abdulkadir, photography is ultimately an expression of care for family, friends and her community. Since her childhood, images have provided a way for her relatives — spread across Sweden, the UK, Kenya, Egypt and Somalia — to stay connected.
“You sent the photos — you didn’t necessarily keep them for yourself,” she says, recalling a moment when she discovered photographs of herself that her father had sent 15 years earlier in the homes of family members in Cairo.
Asked what she hopes people take away from the exhibition, her answer is simple: “I hope people see the love that’s there. I hope they feel that it’s true.”
Soft Focus is open at Moderna Museet in Malmö, Sweden, until 27 September 2026.
