Two Photographers, One Room at Moderna Museet

May 4. Moderna Museet in Stockholm opened two photography shows on the same floor. Deborah Turbeville's work fills one room. Ikram Abulkadir's fills the next. The museum framed them separately, but the wall between them is thin.

Turbeville shot fashion in the '70s and '80s with a softness that felt like memory, not aspiration. Her images blur at the edges. The bodies in them often turn away from the camera, caught mid-movement or mid-thought. The clothes are secondary to the atmosphere. Abulkadir, working now, shoots the body as architecture. Her subjects face forward. The frame is clean. The garment sits on the figure with intention, not accident.

The contrast is the point. Turbeville's fashion photography resisted the commercial mandate of its time. Abulkadir's does the same, but from a different angle. Where Turbeville softened, Abulkadir sharpens. Where Turbeville's figures receded into dreamlike interiors, Abulkadir's occupy space with clarity. Both photographers use fashion as a starting point, not an end.

The museum didn't explicitly link the two shows in its press materials. The pairing reads as curatorial instinct rather than thesis. But the result is a conversation. Turbeville's work asks what happens when fashion steps out of focus. Abulkadir's asks what happens when it steps into it. The answer, in both cases, is that the body becomes something other than a mannequin.

The Turbeville retrospective has been traveling since 2022. The Abulkadir show is newer, commissioned for the space. The timing suggests the museum saw the overlap. A visitor walks through Turbeville's room first, then into Abulkadir's. The sequence matters. The soft dissolves before the sharp arrives.

Both shows run through August 17. Stockholm, if you're passing through.