Warps and Waves in the Fabric of Time

Artists: Sampson Addae (Ghana/Norway), Petra Bauer (Sweden), Nanna Debois Buhl (Denmark), Michelle Eistrup (Denmark/Jamaica), Terike Haapoja (Finland), Kalle Hamm (Finland), Marcia Harvey Isaksson (Sweden/Zimbabwe), Dzamil Kamanger (Finland/Iran), Maria Kapajeva (Estonia), Sohorab Rabbey (Bangladesh/Germany), Yasmin Smith (Australia), and Paola Torres Núñez del Prado (Sweden/Peru).

Curator: Taru Elfving.

Borås Art Biennial 2026 spins a web of tales and testimonies that trace the legacies of textile industry. Unfolding across the city centre and at the Art and Textile Museums in Borås, the 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. The biennial sets out to unravel and mend this fabric of time stretched between the river and the factory, here and elsewhere, then and now. Local and planetary circulations of water form the fluid coordinates of the exhibition. 

The history of Borås is closely intertwined with textiles. During the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s, some of the first weaving mills in Sweden were established here. The city’s development was built upon a centuries-old cottage industry. Geography also played a part, as Borås has access to global maritime routes via the port of Gothenburg. Thanks to the westerly winds the local climate is humid and the river Viskan provided water for the thirsty industry.

Borås Art Biennial 2026 attends to the lives and labours that have been foundational for industrial development, like warps in a loom, yet which often remain overshadowed by the roar of technological progress. The artworks weave narrative and material threads across time and space between the migration of people and knowledge, women’s work and movements for social justice, and the vital more-than-human labourers making it all possible.

As the environmental crisis deepens and advances in AI threaten livelihoods, existential questions concerning the circulation of matter and the value of work have come to haunt us. Attending to these ghosts in the machine, the exhibition sidesteps both apocalyptic and techno-utopian scenarios, searching instead for potential pathways for futures built on alliances through time and across geographies.

Journeying across the Nordic-Baltic region and the Atlantic, to the Middle East, West Africa, and Southeast Asia, the artworks in the Biennial reflect both colonial histories and the unequal distribution of wealth today. Under the weight of these stories and bodies of evidence, the deterministic linearity of time wavers and warps, giving way to alternative imaginaries of the times yet to come.

The ninth edition of Borås Art Biennial 2026 is organised by Borås Art Museum in collaboration with the Swedish Museum of Textiles. 

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.