Museum Tinguely in Basel turns to a long-neglected subject in a new exhibition: the visual language of women’s labor, from factory work and domestic drudgery to care, reproduction, and the body’s own memory of repetitive action. Labouring Bodies gathers work by 36 artists from the turn of the 20th century to the present, using machines and technology as a lens for examining how women’s work has been made visible — and how often it has not.
The exhibition was inspired by Alexandra Navratil’s 2016 film The Night Side, according to curator Sandra Beate Reimann. The film follows Gundula Brett, a former worker at the Agfa-Orwo photographic film factory, as she returns to the site years after it was closed and later transformed into a museum after German reunification in the 1990s. Reimann points to the factory’s reliance on the “nimble fingers” of its female employees, who worked in darkness by touch alone to produce light-sensitive material. In Navratil’s film, that tactile knowledge becomes a way of thinking about labor as something stored in the body.
That idea shapes the exhibition’s structure. Rather than separating productive and reproductive labor, Reimann arranges the show thematically to emphasize their overlap. “The point is that reproductive labour is the foundation for productive labour,” she says. “So I didn’t want to recreate this gendered work division.”
Among the key works is a specially reconstructed piece by Mary Kelly, whose mid-1970s installation links a female factory worker at a machine with footage of the artist stroking her pregnant belly. The pairing draws a sharp line between paid industrial labor and the unpaid, embodied work of reproduction, while insisting that both are governed by repetition, discipline, and unequal value. Helen Chadwick’s In the Kitchen (1977) extends that critique into the home, where domestic appliances become emblems of subjection.
The exhibition also reaches further back than the second-wave feminism of the 1970s. Works by Sella Hasse and Alice Lex-Nerlinger show that artists were already confronting industrial exhaustion and domestic double burdens in the early 20th century. Hasse’s Female Industrial Workers, made around 1915, fuses women’s bodies with machinery, while Lex-Nerlinger’s The Seamstress, from around 1928, presents the home as another site of relentless piecework and childcare.
Contemporary artists sharpen the argument for the present day. Juliana Huxtable’s unsettling vision of lactating figures, Ani Liu’s work Untitled (Feeding Through Space and Time), and Frida Orupabo’s Baby in Belly all extend the exhibition’s inquiry into the uneasy boundary between care and commodity. The show includes only two male artists, Jean Tinguely and John Heartfield, a reminder that its focus remains firmly on women’s labor and the systems that have shaped it.
Labouring Bodies is on view until November 8, offering a history of work that is at once intimate, political, and still unresolved.
