Labour has a familiar face in art history: the worker at the machine, the factory floor, the smoking chimney. This image is not wrong. But it is incomplete. It can easily obscure the activities that sustain bodies, raise children and make spaces habitable – and usually receive neither wages nor monuments. The exhibition ‘Labouring Bodies’ at Museum Tinguely addresses precisely this blind spot. Until 8 November, it brings together historical and contemporary works that consider bodies, technology and labour together from a feminist perspective.
Its strongest argument is this: machines do not shape bodies only in factories. Kitchens, clerical work and care also organise movement, time and attention. Anyone who looks for labour only where goods are produced mistakes part of society’s productive activity for mere nature.
The Kitchen Is Not the Factory’s Opposite
In Margaret Raspé’s 1974 film ‘Alle Tage wieder – Let Them Swing’ (Every Day Again – Let Them Swing), washing up becomes a sequence of recurring gestures. The artist filmed her everyday work using a helmet-mounted camera she had developed herself; the viewpoint follows the activity rather than arranging it from outside as a domestic idyll. This does not suddenly make the ordinary appear heroic. It makes it precise: water, dishes and hands form a workflow that occupies both body and attention.
Helen Chadwick’s ‘In the Kitchen’ from 1977 takes a different approach. In the performance, Chadwick and three other female performers wore costumes based on kitchen appliances and fittings – a cooker, a fridge, a washing machine and a sink. The transformation is satirical, but not innocuous: the female body is directly conflated with the appliances, as though housework belonged to it as naturally as an apron belonged in the home. Chadwick makes this association visible by exaggerating it.
Both works challenge a convenient hierarchy: factory work as modern production, housework as private repetition. The kitchen is not outside the economy. It is one of its preconditions. Meals, clean clothes and care keep workers and families going; the fact that these services often remain unpaid does not make them unproductive.
Who Counts – and What Counts as Work?
The exhibition proposes an art history in which it is not only machines and industrial processes that count, but also the bodies that operate them, endure them or care for them outside paid employment. This is a necessary correction. Yet it carries a risk: care work must not be reinscribed as a supposedly essential female role. Visibility alone does not free an activity from its unequal distribution. Nor does it automatically turn every everyday gesture into art or resistance.
The present offers no grounds for nostalgia either. According to estimates by the International Labour Organization, 748 million people worldwide were outside the labour force in 2023 because of care responsibilities; 708 million of them were women. This figure does not measure every hour of unpaid work, nor does it explain all the differences between countries. It does, however, show how difficult it is to dismiss the division between paid employment and care work as a private matter.
The Machine Does Not Stop at the Factory Gate
‘Labouring Bodies’ broadens the view without writing off industrial history. In Evelyn Richter’s photographs, women in textile factories appear as workers whose bodies are shaped by machines and their rhythms. Other works shift the question to the office, childbirth and digital production. What emerges is no simple opposition between cold technology and human warmth: care, too, can be routine, exhausting and hierarchically organised; technology can make work easier, but it can equally intensify control.
By the end of the Basel exhibition, what remains is therefore less a reassuring message than a challenge to how we see. If art history tells the story of labour, it must ask who moves the body, who cares for it and who finds the time to do so. The factory belongs in this history. But without the kitchen, care and the unassuming repetitions of everyday life, it remains a history without foundations.
Original reviewed by the editors · 31 October 2026
