Labouring
Bodies

Alexandra Navratil, «The Night Side» (video still), 2016, HD video. Courtesy the artist

Labouring Bodies

10 June – 8 November 2026

Labouring Bodies explores the relationship between the body, labour and technology from a feminist perspective. The extensive group exhibition shows how the human body – especially the feminized and marginalized human body – has been shaped and controlled by machines since the dawn of the modern age, and how it has also been understood as a site of resistance. With its focus on working with machines, the technologization of production and reproduction, and women’s contribution to technological progress, the show invites us to rethink our notions of the body, labour and care. Spanning the period from the early twentieth century to the present, the works in the exhibition reveal parallels and underscore the ongoing relevance and topicality of the subject matter.

Arists: Berenice Abbott, Monira Al Qadiri, Rosa Barba, Alexandra Bircken, Daniela Brugger, Ursula Burghardt, Feliza Bursztyn, Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise, Helen Chadwick, Sella Hasse, John Heartfield, Pati Hill, Rebecca Horn, Juliana Huxtable, Doruntina Kastrati, Mary Kelly, Aurora Király, Kiki Kogelnik, Azade Köker, Suzanne Lacy, Magda Langenstraß-Uhlig, Alice Lex-Nerlinger, Ani Liu, Lee Lozano, Alexandra Navratil, Katja Novitskova, Ernestyna Orlowska, Frida Orupabo, Margaret Raspé, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Tabita Rezaire, Evelyn Richter, Niki de Saint Phalle, Marilou Schultz, Jean Tinguely, Doris Ziegler, et al.

Ernestyna Orlowska, Make Your Body Your Machine, 2021 © Ernestyna Orlowska; photo: Margot Roth  

Exploring the close connection between humans and machines in the industrial age, the exhibition deliberately shifts the focus of attention away from the dominant figure of the male worker towards bodies that have often been overlooked in art and theory. One striking example of this is the film The Night Side (2016) by Alexandra Navratil: instead of the expected dynamic of industrial production, we see the careful, almost intimate touching of machine parts by the hand of a former worker. Her gesture points to an alternative narrative of labour – one shaped not by efficiency but by experience, memory and physicality.

The exhibition brings together historical and contemporary works by 36 artists that render visible the mechanization of the body in various contexts. Photographs by Evelyn Richter show women working in weaving mills, their bodies dominated by machines, while Akkordarbeiterin (1987), a sculpture by Azade Köker, addresses the fragmentation of the body by industrial work processes. Contemporary works like A Horn That Swallows Songs (2025) by Doruntina Kastrati or the performance Make Your Body Your Machine (2021-ongoing) by Ernestyna Orlowska bring these issues into the present and shed light on new forms of precarity in a globalized labour market.

Helen Chadwick, In the Kitchen (Stove), 1977. © The Estate of Helen Chadwick. Courtesy the Estate of Helen Chadwick and Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, Rome and New York

Broadening the usual focus, Labouring Bodies considers not only paid wage labour but also unpaid domestic and care work as a central but often invisible foundation for economic systems. From the 1970s, women artists associated with second-wave feminism questioned capitalist notions of productivity and the dichotomy of paid and unpaid labour. In 1974, Mary Kelly showed a double film projection juxtaposing footage from a tin can factory with images of her own pregnant belly. This installation, shown only once, has been reconstructed for the first time as part of Labouring Bodies. Artists like Margaret Raspé made the monotony and endlessness of domestic routine visible in their work, while the performance In the Kitchen (1977) by Helen Chadwick critiques the mechanization of housework and stages the female body as part of a technical apparatus. It is less well-known that in the early twentieth century, women artists like Alice Lex-Nerlinger and Sella Hasse were already reflecting critically on the double exploitation of female workers.

The ‘labouring body’ is also to be understood in the biological sense of a body giving birth. A key work in this context is HON, an installation realized by Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet (1966) that presents the female body as a mechanical conglomerate of technology and media. Ani Liu and Katja Novitskova show how reproductive labour is being technologized today and ask what uncanny forms care might take in the future. This is supplemented by works in which Juliana Huxtable, Frida Orupabo and Tabita Rezaire address forms of control over the female body – especially the Black female body – and its reproductive capacities.

Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt, HON, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, 1966; photo: Hans Hammarskiöld, © Hans Hammarskiöld Heritage

Via the example of work on typewriters, adding machines, photocopiers and computers, the exhibition looks at the gendered assignment of repetitive, mechanical tasks. In works by Rebecca Horn (Erika, 1992), Feliza Bursztyn, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Jean Tinguely (Olympia, 1960), the typewriter is interpreted as a historical symbol of female office work and as an artistic medium, while the female-coded working body is associated with mechanical apparatus.

The exhibition also explores the links between textile production and digital technology. Whereas weaving was long coded as a female activity, machines and computers figure as male-determined. The contributions of women to the history of digital and computer technology, such as those made by the mathematician Ada Lovelace (1815–52), were long overlooked. Before the emergence of ‘the computer’ as a technical device, ‘the computers’ were above all women. Rosa Barba dedicated her work Send Me Sky, Henrietta (2018) to Henrietta S. Leavitt (1868–1921) who worked as a ‘human computer’ and whose calculations led her to discover a way of measuring distances in the universe. The interweaving of the histories of the loom and the computer manifests in the Navajo rug created specially for the exhibition by Marilou Schultz that is visually inspired by computer chips while also recalling the hiring of Navajo women in the production of these components in the early computer industry in the United States.

Evelyn Richter, Kammgarnspinnerei. Markkleeberg, 1970, Evelyn Richter Archive of the East German Savings Banks Foundation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig, © Evelyn Richter Archive

Daniela Brugger, muddy codes & soft infrastructures (Langenthal version), 2025. Installation view at Kunsthaus Langenthal. Photo: Kunsthaus Langenthal, Cedric Mussano

The exhibition traces these historical lines into the present, also looking at the invisible data work performed by millions of people around the world. In her work muddy codes and soft infrastructures (2026) Daniela Brugger reflects the mental and social impact of these new forms of labour anticipated by the early-twentieth-century homework.

Labouring Bodies takes central issues from today’s art discourse and major exhibitions of recent years and develops their approaches from a feminist viewpoint, focussing on a critical reappraisal of contemporary discourse on the body and questioning reductive readings such as naïve celebrations of human-machine hybridity. The exhibition also pursues Museum Tinguely’s engagement with the relationship between humans and machines, a theme that resonates in many of its shows, last addressed explicitly in the exhibition Robot Dreams (2010). Like Territories of Waste (2022/3), it also deals with the material basis of our society. With his self-declared goal of freeing machines from their existence as slaves, Jean Tinguely also fundamentally questioned modernity’s functional and instrumental definitions of technology and machinery.

With Labouring Bodies, Museum Tinguely positions itself as a place where discourse around machines and movement is expanded to include an urgently required sociopolitical dimension. The exhibition understands mechanization not as a historical process that is now complete, but as an ongoing dynamic by which bodies are shaped and hierarchized, but which also opens up spaces for artistic resistance. By creating a dialog between works from the early twentieth century to the present day, Labouring Bodies offers new ways of looking at the history of the modern age – as well as raising important questions about the world we live in today.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive programme of events.

Curator: Dr. Sandra Beate Reimann

Lee Lozano, No title, ca. 1964. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Collection Services © The Estate of Lee Lozano

The exhibition catalogue, illustrated in colour, includes a curatorial essay and short texts on the artists and works featured in the exhibition. Alongside the print version, the catalogue will also be available as a PDF that can be downloaded for free from the museum’s website.

Eric Hattan, Jet d’OH!, 2000 Abfalleimer, Abfall, Auslösemechanismus, 120 x ø 40 cm © Foto: 2000, Claude Joray, courtesey Transfert, Biel/Bienne

Monira Al Qadiri, Alien Technology (Diamond), 2023 © Monira Al Qadiri. Commissioned by Kunsthaus Bregenz; photo: Markus Tretter