Labouring Bodies: Women, Machines and the Work That Never Stops

A new exhibition at Museum Tinguely in Basel surveys more than a century of art that interrogates women's relationship with machines and technology. Just as women's work—frequently unwaged, domestic and caring—has remained largely unseen, so too has much of the art it inspires. Alongside figures such as Helen Chadwick and Mary Kelly, who in the 1970s operated at the sharp edge of second-wave feminism, the show introduces artists who were confronting similar injustices decades earlier.

Featuring 36 artists working from the turn of the 20th century to the present day, Labouring Bodies builds on Jean Tinguely's enduring fascination with the human-machine relationship, examining female labour in all its forms—in offices and factories, in the home, and in the biological sense—through painting, film, photography and installation.

The exhibition's genesis lies in a short film by the Swiss artist Alexandra Navratil, The Night Side (2016), says curator Sandra Beate Reimann. In it, former worker Gundula Brett returns to the Agfa-Orwo photographic film factory years after its closure and conversion into a museum following German reunification in the 1990s. The factory had prized the "nimble fingers" of its female employees, who worked in darkness by touch alone, manufacturing light-sensitive material.

It is these long-remembered movements that Navratil captures, as Brett reacquaints herself with machinery she knew intimately for 25 years. "Her body remembers the movements," Reimann explains, noting how the tenderness of her touch evokes the full spectrum of female labour as it extends beyond the workplace into the home and family. "I thought that could be an interesting way to look at the relationship of body and machine, by looking at the female worker, not just the male worker, as it has always been done. When you look at women working in factories, you immediately come to the unpaid work, and then reproduction work, and care work."

Arranged broadly thematically, the exhibition takes care to avoid reinforcing false boundaries, Reimann says. "The point is that reproductive labour is the foundation for productive labour. So I didn't want to recreate this gendered work division."

The connections between different facets of female labour are the subject of a lesser-known work by Mary Kelly from the mid-1970s, specially reconstructed for the show. The installation, presented only once before its constituent films became separate works, features recordings of a female factory worker at a machine alongside footage of the artist stroking her own pregnant belly—distinct spheres of female labour united by poor pay and repetitive actions.

Such inequality is deepened by the persistent expectation that women bear the burden of housework. In Helen Chadwick's seminal performance In the Kitchen (1977), women effectively wear domestic appliances as markers of their subjection.

These concerns feel distinctly post-war, yet the work of two little-known German artists, Sella Hasse and Alice Lex-Nerlinger, demonstrates that they were on the agenda from the early 20th century. Hasse's exhausted women merge with machinery in Female Industrial Workers (around 1915), while in Lex-Nerlinger's The Seamstress (around 1928), the home becomes a site of double drudgery for piece workers who were likely also caring for children.

Similar patterns persist today, Reimann notes: "A lot of female data workers do this kind of work, on the side, at home, on their own computers, while also watching their children."

Juliana Huxtable's unsettling vision of lactating women as sexualised, industrialised farm animals offers an extreme reading of how breastfeeding and milk production collapse the boundary between care and commodity. Ani Liu's installation Untitled (Feeding Through Space and Time) (2022) presents a less hyperbolic but no less pointed vision of mechanised reproductive labour, framing the breast pump as both aid and trap that implicitly hastens a mother's return to paid work.

Pregnancy and childbirth represent a moment of particular vulnerability for all women, but in her collages made from historical images, Frida Orupabo considers her own experiences as part of a longstanding history of inequality and prejudice against pregnant Black women. The high-heeled shoes kicked off beside the pregnant figure in Baby in Belly (2020) hint at the racist and highly dangerous assumption made by medical staff that Black women possess a high pain threshold.

Featuring work by only two male artists—Tinguely himself and John Heartfield—Labouring Bodies presents an area of uniquely female experience, repeated generation after generation.

• Labouring Bodies, Museum Tinguely, Basel, until 8 November