Museum Tinguely’s new exhibition “Labouring Bodies” explores the relationship between the body, labor 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, labor, 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.
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 labor market.
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 dialogue between works from the early 20th 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.

Website
tinguely.ch/en/exhibitions/exhibitions/2026/labouring-bodies.html

Where
Museum Tinguely
Paul Sacher-Anlage 2
4002 Basel

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