Whose Body Is in the Museum?

A museum does not simply display bodies; it orders them. Who acts, who is looked at, whose work counts as work – such questions run through three exhibitions that intersect in November in Wien, Basel and Düsseldorf. The connection is not a shared curatorial intention but a way of reading them: taken together, the exhibitions reveal how bodies absorb social relations while also resisting them.

In Wien, ‘Feminist Futures Forever’ opens at Belvedere 21. The exhibition looks back at ‘Kunst mit Eigen-Sinn’, an international exhibition of women artists held at the same venue in 1985. It brings together practices across generations and media; the exhibition design by Dorit Margreiter Choy and Cosma Grosser is intended to open up the museum space itself, as an institutional order, to debate. Works by Maria Lassnig, ORLAN, Marina Abramović and younger women artists do not represent a single, linear history of feminism. This multiplicity of voices is precisely the approach’s strength – and its challenge: historical differences cannot be resolved simply by placing works alongside one another in an exhibition space.

Work That Shapes the Body

In Basel, ‘Labouring Bodies’ at Museum Tinguely closes on 8 November. Here, the body is examined not only as an image or an expression of identity, but as labour power – called upon by machines, production processes and invisible care work. This broadens an art history that has often placed the industrial worker at its centre as a male figure. Evelyn Richter’s photographs of women in a spinning mill are shown alongside works addressing housework, reproduction and new forms of digital labour.

A striking example is Helen Chadwick’s ‘In the Kitchen’ of 1977: the performance places the female body in relation to kitchen appliances, making domestic routine legible as technical, repetitive work. The exhibition thus poses a productive counter-question to the widespread enthusiasm for human–machine connections: who controls the technology, and whose body is adapted to it? Yet a feminist perspective must also take care not to subsume different experiences under a single category of ‘women’s work’. The exhibition opens up this perspective through works that also consider racialised bodies and the differing historical conditions of labour.

The Body as Model, the Body as Power

From 14 November, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen presents an extensive exhibition of Thomas Schütte’s work at K21 in Düsseldorf. Alongside sculptures such as ‘Vater Staat’ (Father State) and ‘Mutter Erde’ (Mother Earth), it offers a survey of his architectural models. Schütte works with wood, ceramics, bronze and other materials; his models are not neutral miniatures but proposals for how private and public space might be organised. The Kunstsammlung describes his work as a critical, often ironic exploration of being human, society and power.

Here, the guiding question shifts: not only which body becomes visible, but what kind of built order it is meant to inhabit. Schütte’s figures and houses can be read as counterpoints to the concerns of the exhibitions in Wien and Basel – not because they espouse the same feminist perspective, but because they explore power and living together through bodies and space. Such a connection must not flatten differences: a feminist critique of exclusion and an individual artist’s model-based examination of society are not equivalent positions.

So what is in the museum? No body exists outside its conditions. In Wien, the institution itself becomes a site of feminist remembrance; Basel traces how work disciplines bodies and renders care invisible; Düsseldorf asks what spaces and orders we design. Read together, the three exhibitions shift the focus from merely being represented to the question of who is allowed to act, work and claim space. Visibility is a beginning – but not yet an answer to the distribution of power.