Curated by Megan Piper

13 September – 19 October 2025

kollectiv, 69 Old High Street, Folkestone, CT20 1RN

Coinciding with the Folkestone Triennial in which Rubiane Maia is one of 18 participating artists, Borders Without Edges focuses on Maia’s performance, film and photographic works to explore our relationships with memory and movement, and the powerful connection between the body and nature.

Borders Without Edges unsettles the conventional notion of a boundary as a rigid, definitive line.  This exhibition proposes a radical rethinking of borders as porous, mutable spaces, zones of becoming rather than of separation. The artist invites us to inhabit a space where edges no longer define containment but become sites of encounter and transformation. They are neither barriers nor absolutes, but living surfaces of continuous becoming.

Considering the elements of earth, wind, fire (light) and water, the exhibition is anchored by four video works that consider the interaction between humans and their environment and the challenges that are faced as one engages with the other. Alongside these, a series of photographs reflect on our connection to the earth. The surviving elements of Speirein (2021) –

Maia’s 10-hour performance in which she engaged in a repetitive process of casting her feet – will be installed to create a place to reflect on the myriad journeys that define us. 

 Stones Across the Ocean is an ongoing video and performance work that serves as a starting point for the exhibition and our connection to water. The first video, Part One, was made in September 2017, five days before the birth of the artist’s son, and observes the repetitive action of throwing a stone into the sea. At a threshold before motherhood takes form, Maia stands on the beach in Folkestone – waves crashing, the wind noisily present – and throws stone after stone into the sea, using as much force as possible. The stones’ journey continues into the unknown. Part Two, filmed in Gran Canaria in 2020, sees the artist revisit the same repetitive gesture with her young son, who now participates in the work. The landscape is different, we see her hold his hand, teach him how to throw, steady him, the memory of the first performance translated into a more complex, human, co-dependent relationship.

 As part of this exhibition, in collaboration with St Eanswythe’s Primary School, Maia will invite children from Year 3, along with their mothers and/or carers, to participate in a durational performance on the beach, creating a collective experience that further develops the connection between the artist and her son through this work. The resulting film, Stones Across the Ocean: Part Three, will be presented at kollectiv during the exhibition’s closing weekend on 18 and 19 October.

 The second work in the exhibition, In the Time of the Flying Fishes (2022) was created during a residency that Maia completed in Gran Canaria. The Canary Islands are an archipelago formed by seven volcanic islands in the Atlantic, west of Morocco. Politically they belong to Spain, geographically to Africa. The title of the work was inspired by research into the Indigenous peoples of that region, the Guanches, who inhabited the islands before the Spanish colonisation in the 15th century. They had limited knowledge of naval navigation and boat building, despite their arrival on the islands by sea. Without advanced seafaring skills, they primarily fished in coastal waters, waiting for the tide to recede. In the film, Maia navigates the landscape with a rusty old fishing frame, rolling the object, spinning, searching, carrying. Shadows move across the ground, lines that seek to trace the peoples eradicated by colonisation.

Catching the Wind (2016), is a collaboration between Rubiane Maia and Carla Borba and was developed through a residency in Brazil with Galeria Península. The artists travelled for eight days through the country’s southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, and the film was shot on vast sand dunes close to the sea where the minuano – the cold south-westerly wind – blows with great intensity. The performance took place within the Lagoa do Peixe National Park and involved an 80-metre-long stretch of striped orange fabric that violently dances as the artists, dressed in orange work clothes, seek to catch the wind, requiring extraordinary physical effort.

The fourth work, Temporary Window – In Light of Shadows (2016), was performed during a three-week artistic residency at Centro de las Artes de San Agustín in Mexico during which the artist developed research based on the observation of light (solar and artificial). In the film, Maia uses her own body as the central axis as she moves an imposing 2.5 x 2.5 metre grid through space. Shadows glide across the ground, the form of the structure moves against the sky, light finds new ways to communicate its presence and the body and frame merge to recreate the landscape.

The relationship between the high and low tides through moon phases creates space for reflection during the exhibition, which coincides with the Harvest Moon. Through the sea, the effects of the moon reveal themselves in a visible, direct way, amplified during the full moon with higher and lower tides. During the exhibition, Maia will leave instructions for visitors to participate (independently) in a performance work, Waterline (2021), creating an opportunity for her performative gestures to continue, choreographed outside the gallery walls. As she says,

‘Waterline emerges as a gesture that seeks to approach and to make contact with the unlimited memory archive of the salty waters. An attempt to give account of everything the waves bring us at the seashore; a proposal in which physical, conceptual, and ritualistic atmospheres cross each other’.