This group show at Museum Tinguely explores how machines have shaped, controlled, and hierarchized marginalized bodies since the modern era. Curated by Dr. Sandra Beate Reimann, it highlights the body as a dynamic site of resistance and care. Visitors will experience a wide range of mediums including installations, photography, and performance art.
Read curatorial context and practical visitor information for Labouring Bodies at Museum Tinguely in Basel
Labouring Bodies explores the relationship between the human body, labor, and technology through a feminist lens, focusing on how machines have shaped and controlled marginalized bodies since the modern age. The exhibition presents a dialogue between historical and contemporary works, questioning traditional notions of productivity and demonstrating the body's role as a site of resistance and care.
Labouring Bodies shifts the focus of industrial history away from the traditional male worker to highlight how bodies—particularly those that are feminized or marginalized—have been shaped and hierarchized by mechanization. By bringing together works from the early twentieth century to the present day, the exhibition addresses themes of paid wage labor, unpaid domestic and care work, and the digital precarity of the modern globalized market. It invites visitors to reconsider the dichotomies between human and machine, while challenging reductive views of technology and celebrating artistic strategies of resistance. The show features a diverse range of historical and contemporary works, including installations, photography, and performance art, which reveal how mechanized production and digital systems continue to influence our physical existence. From the pioneering feminist inquiries into housework in the 1970s to modern reflections on the invisible data work and the technological control of the body, the exhibition highlights the ongoing relevance of these issues. Through this dialogue, the exhibition expands the museum's commitment to exploring the relationship between humans and machines, positioning the human body not just as an object of industrial exploitation, but as a dynamic site of memory, experience, and agency.
The museum offers various entry options for visitors. Please check the Museum Tinguely website for general admission details, as some events and guided tours may be free, while others require standard museum entry or specific booking arrangements.
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