BorÄs Konstmuseum
P A Halls terrass
501 15 BorÄs
Sweden
BorÄs Art Biennial 2026
For the ninth time, BorĂ„s Art Museum presents the BorĂ„s Art Biennial. In 2026, the biennial is organized in collaboration with the Textile Museum in BorĂ„s, where participating artists explores BorĂ„sâ textile industrial heritage and the cityâs 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 BorĂ„s Art Museum, the Textile Museum, and throughout the cityâs public spaces.
Warps & Waves in the Fabric of Time
BorÄs 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 BorÄs, 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. BorÄs 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 BorÄs. 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, womenâs 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.
Images: TERIKE HAAPOJA, Socialism for All Animals, 2026, PETRA BAUER, Women in Movement (BorĂ„s, 2026), 2026, PETRA BAUER, Women in Movement (BorĂ„s, 2026), 2026, YASMIN SMITH, Soft Water, 2025, MARCIA HARVEY ISAKSSON, Stretching the Cord, 2026, MICHELLE EISTRUP, Crossroads and Mindful Movements â dem defy silence, 2025/2026, NANNA DEBOIS BUHL, Computers Were Women, 2026, NANNA DEBOIS BUHL, Shape Shifters, 2026, SAMPSON ADDAE, Giftström, 2026 and Aliens, 2026, TERIKE HAAPOJA, We Have Fed You All, For A Thousand Years, 2026, SOHORAB RABBEY, Amphibian Myths of an Unseen River: Viskan, Turag and Other Beings, 2026, SOHORAB RABBEY, Amphibian Myths of an Unseen River: Waves and Wounds, 2026, SAMPSON ADDAE, Far And Near, 2025, MARIA KAPAJEVA, Cutbacks: Figures, 2017 and Mapping My Mother 2017 â pĂ„gĂ„ende / ongoing, KALLE HAMM, Colour Theory by Plants, 2026, PAOLA TORRES NĂĂEZ DEL PRADO, Weaving Gardens (Deconstruction I) 2026, MICHELLE EISTRUP, Dikenga â Four Faces of the Sun, 2024/2026, DZAMIL KAMANGER, Bead Ryas. Photo: Hendrik Zeitler
