For the Borås Art Biennial 2026, Terike Haapoja presents a series of works that expand her ongoing artistic research on what she has termed “animal capitalism”: capitalism’s reliance on animal exploitation. The project maps the unrecognised work of nature and imagines a labour movement for animals in dialogue with human essential workers.

In the city centre of Borås, a new public artwork along the river Viskan, the mural We Have Fed You All, For a Thousand Years (2026) honours the multitude of non-waged workers – humans and other animals, plants and insects – whose vital contribution to the textile industry globally has been largely unacknowledged. Drawing inspiration from traditional textile motifs that Haapoja discovered in the collection of the Textile Museum of Sweden, the mural traces the flow of the river, stitching it together with a web of other rivers and histories of collective multispecies labour struggles.

A series of flags, Socialism for All Animals (2026), lines the street Österlånggatan, leading from the Textile Museum to Stora torget, the central square in Borås. Following the traditions of public protest, the flags call for equal rights for all animals. Haapoja’s video work The River, Rivers (2026), commissioned for the biennial and exhib-ited at the Textile Museum, juxtaposes planetary circulations of water with the circulation of capital within the textile industry. The video installation immerses the viewer in a journey along the river Viskan. Travelling above and below the water’s sur-face, the work creates an audiovisual confluence of rivers and their links to the textile industry across the globe.

The work of Terike Haapoja (born 1974 in Helsinki; lives in Berlin, Germany) is focused on the human relationship with the natural world and the ques- tion of multispecies justice. She examines how various structures of power and knowledge in society justify exclusion and exploitation. Haapoja’s projects often point to utopian alter-natives for institutions such as museums and political parties.