Borås Art Biennial 2026

For the ninth time, Borås Art Museum presents the Borås Art Biennial. In 2026, the biennial will be organized in collaboration with the Textile Museum in Borås, where participating artists will explore Borås’ textile industrial heritage and the city’s contemporary identity.

The curator of the biennale is Taru Elfving, based in Helsinki and internationally active, focusing on site-sensitive investigations at the intersection of ecological, feminist, and decolonial practices. Elfving holds a PhD in Philosophy from Goldsmiths University of London and has, among other projects, curated the Finnish pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015.

From May 30 to September 27, visitors are invited to experience magnificent and thought-provoking contemporary art at Borås Art Museum, the Textile Museum, and throughout the city’s public spaces.

Warps & Waves in the Fabric of Time

Borås Art Biennial 2026 spins a web of tales and testimonies that trace the legacies of textile industry. Unfolding across the city centre and between the Art and Textile Museums in Borås, the biennial exhibition Warps & Waves in the Fabric of Time engages with the interwoven societal and ecological transformations accelerated by industrial modernity.

Industrialisation revolutionised both the concept and the experience of time. Borås Art Biennial 2026 sets out to unravel and mend this fabric of time stretched between the river and the factory, here and elsewhere, then and now. Planetary circulations of water form the fluid coordinates of the exhibition. Rivers guide the navigation across the many entangled temporalities. Winds and ocean currents remind of the intimate connections across vast geographical distances.

The artists included in the Biennial work with diverse media ranging from living organism to generative algorithms, and many of them are producing new site-responsive commissions for Borås. The Biennial also includes for the first time an artistic collaboration with the Flower Programme of the city.

The art works in the exhibition attend to and honour the myriad lives and labours that have been foundational for industrial development, like warps in a loom, yet which often remain shadowed by the roar of technological progress. The exhibition weaves narrative and material threads across time and space between, amongst others, the migration of people and knowledges along maritime routes, women’s work and movements for social justice, and the vital more-than-human labourers making it all possible.

Under the weight of these stories and bodies of evidence and agency, the determinist linearity of time begins to waver and warp as it gives way for alternative imaginaries of the future, the times yet to come.

Artists:

Sampson Addae (NO/GH)

Petra Bauer (SE)

Nanna Debois Buhl (DK)

Michelle Eistrup (DK/JM)

Terike Haapoja (DE/FI)

Kalle Hamm (FI) (Collaboration, sound piece: Lauri Ainala)

Marcia Harvey Isaksson (SE/ZW)

Dzamil Kamanger (FI/IR)

Maria Kapajeva (EE)

Sohorab Rabbey (DE/BD)

Yasmin Smith (AU)

Paola Torres Núñez del Prado (SE/PE)