At the Borås Art Biennial 2026, Maria Kapajeva presents works from her long-term inquiry into the social transformations affecting her hometown Narva, Estonia, where the textile industry was gradually dismantled in the early 2000s. Kreenholm, one of the largest textile factories in Europe during the Soviet era, was the main employer in the area. It was privatised in the 1990s and acquired by Borås Wäfveri. Kreenholm finally closed in 2010, as part of the broader shift of textile production away from Europe.

At the Textile Museum of Sweden, Kapajeva exhibits a series of collages, Cutbacks (2017), made from fibre-based photographic posters, produced in the 1980s, that she found at an abandoned textile mill. Kapajeva cut out and filled the silhouettes of the people with a hand-painted Photoshop pattern. The textile work 12,000 (2016) is stamped with the Kreenholm logo. The stamp, gifted to Kapajeva by one of the former workers, had been used at the factory control check to highlight defects. Kapajeva stamped the logo 12,000 times, once for each worker who lost their job, including her own parents. For Group Photo.2017 (2017) she invited former workers to gather in front of the main gates of the closed factory, a site that had played a key role in their lives for decades.

At the Borås Art Museum, a new series of collages, Cutbacks: Figures (2026), portrays the figures of the workers cut out from the old posters. Two new works craft further bridges across time and space: Mapping My Mother (2017-) is an ongoing work adapted for each site, made with a textile design pattern that Kapajeva’s mother created at Kreenholm. A new video work, They Come After Us (2026), documents the demolition of an old factory building in 2016, addressing also the ecological impacts of industrial and technological change.

Maria Kapajeva (born 1976 in Narva; lives in Tallinn, Estonia) focuses on marginalised narratives and explores identity formation as an ongoing process. In her art, she has addressed issues of gender and sexuality, displacement and migration, as well as post-Soviet social change.