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At the Factory

“In the radio valve factory I had learned a new phrase. Piecework. People no longer said, I'm coming from the factory, they said, I’m coming from piecework.“

— Emine Sevgi Özdamar

Criticising capitalist conditions was central to the practice of many artists in West Germany. Rather than depicting the daily realities of labour and consumption neutrally, their works sought to expose the underlying power dynamics, profit interests and social inequalities. In doing so, they brought attention to what is often taken for granted or obscured in capitalist everyday life: exploitation, alienation, wage dependency and class relations. Unlike Abstract painting, their representations were figurative, narrative and socially engaged. However, the lived experiences of migrant workers remained largely invisible in this West German critique of capitalism.

Migrant artists in particular engaged with the factory work of so-called guest workers in their art. They depicted piecework on the assembly line, where time, body and wages were directly calculated against one another. Additionally, they used advertising images that were pervasive in urban spaces, magazines and television. These images lured viewers with promises of consumer happiness, societal participation and upward mobility. In this context, the factory and advertising appear as two sides of the same capitalist logic: in the former, people are exploited as labourers; in the latter, they are courted as consumers.

Azade Köker

Akkordarbeiterin

(1987)

Azade Köker began studying sculpture in Istanbul in the late 1960s. She continued her studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in West Berlin, starting in 1973.

In her work Akkordarbeiterin, human and machine-like elements merge to form a bronze figure. The title refers to a pay system in which wages depend on the number of pieces produced on the assembly line. As a result of being paid a lower piece rate, female workers typically earned less than their male colleagues despite performing the same amount of work. In her sculpture, Köker depicts the female worker’s body as an extension of the industrial machines to which her speed was subject. With the defiant posture, the artist evokes the solidarity-driven women’s strikes of the 1970s, when both migrant and non-migrant female workers joined forces to resist discriminatory wage practices.

Bronze sculpture with abstract form. Background shows paintings with figures and blue tones.

Kreuzberg: Kunst und Migration seit 1960, exhibition opening, Gropius Bau, 2026

© Gropius Bau, photo: Rosa Merk

LEE Hye-kyung

공장의 불빛 (Gongjang-ui bulbit) – Das Licht der Fabrik

(1985)

The musical play was originally written and produced in secret by KIM Min-ki in South Korea in 1978. It tells the story of women workers in Seoul who endure harsh working conditions and night shifts with the help of stimulants. They form a trade union following a workplace accident. For performances in West Germany, LEE Hye-kyung substantially reworked the play from 1985 onward: she rewrote the text, expanded the storyline to include the experiences of Korean migrant women in West Germany and thereby made visible the parallels between their living and working conditions and those of the women in South Korea. From 1985 to 1987, this new version was performed, among other venues, at the Museum für Völkerkunde in Dahlem (today the Ethnologisches Museum in the Humboldt Forum). The performers included nurses as well as students and former miners. Among the South Korean “guest workers” in West Germany were around 11,000 nurses. In 1977/1978, they successfully campaigned for the right to remain in the country through a petition.

Jannis Psychopedis

Seminar

(1979)

Jannis Psychopedis arrived in West Berlin in 1977 as a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. His series Seminar, created during this time, illustrates his goal of what is known as critical realism: exposing the ideologies hidden behind the mass-media facades of capitalist social orders. In his drawn collages, Psychopedis combines various visual and textual sources. Idyllic postcard motifs, advertising images, photographs of Wehrmacht soldiers, anatomical drawings of the human body and handwritten excerpts from the writings of Karl Marx (1818–1883) appear on technical graph paper. Among these are passages such as: “The criminal produces not only crimes but also criminal law, and with this also the professor”. Alluding to Marx’s notion of the “anatomy of civil society” (1867), based on the historical development of capitalist relations of production, Psychopedis uses this associative chain to explore the interconnections between West Germany’s affluent society and its Nazi past.

Emancipation

(1974)

Jannis Psychopedis created Emancipation while studying art at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. The piece reflects his historically informed critique of capitalist commodity and image production. In this painted collage, seemingly unrelated images collide: a pornographic depiction of a faceless female body is placed next to a portrait of a cleaning worker, and an advertisement for a German cleaning product appears alongside a snapshot of a family perceived as migrants. Through these juxtapositions, Psychopedis draws attention to the invisibilised labour of Southern Europeans who made West Germany’s postwar economic boom possible. Through an advertisement for the company Henkel, which profited from forced labour and the expropriation of Jewish business owners during the Nazi era, the artist highlights the lingering effects of this past in the Federal Republic of Germany. The scouring cream thus becomes a symbol of the attempt to “wash away” collective crimes through deliberate repression.

More on Jannis Psychopedis

In “Right to the City”

In the exhibition chapter “The Administered Life”

Black-and-white print depicting a long line of people standing behind a counter in the lower part of the image. Above them are two stacked panels: the upper panel shows the torso of a classical statue, while the lower panel contains a bright, silhouette-like human figure.

Monika Sieveking

Gruppenbild mit Siemensarbeiterinnen*

(1973)

As early as her student days in the 1960s at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in West Berlin, Monika Sieveking embraced critical Berlin Realism. Guided by her political activism, Sieveking went on to portray workers in various situations throughout the following years. In this context, she created Gruppenbild mit Siemensarbeiter*innen. In the 1970s, migrants were often hired as cheap labour in textile, food, electrical and metal industries. Large corporations, such as Siemens and AEG-Telefunken, specifically recruited women for piecework and shift work requiring fine motor skills – tasks often performed under conditions that were harmful to their health. After making sketches in the Siemens factory, Sieveking invited workers and artist friends, such as Mehmet Aksoy, to her home to paint their portraits.

Group of factory workers in a break room, expressively drawn, wearing uniforms with machinery in the background.

Monika Sieveking, Gruppenbild mit Siemensarbeiter*innen, 1973, Museum Ludwig, Köln

© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026

More on Monika Sieveking

In the exhibition chapter “Streetplays – Childhood in Kreuzberg”In the exhibition chapter “Pictures of a District”

Hanefi Yeter

Der Mensch, Zeit und Profit

(1983)

In Hanefi Yeter’s painting Der Mensch, Zeit und Profit, workers are shown sewing tablecloths and assembling circuit boards with electronic components. Their body parts – heads, arms and hands – are blurred and doubled, as if caught in rapid motion. Since the 1960s, migrant workers in West Berlin were primarily employed in the textile and electronics industries. Piecework on the assembly line was the typical employment arrangement, where wages depended on the quantity of items produced. To increase production, companies set assembly line speeds high, placing severe health burdens on workers.

More on Hanefi Yeter

In the exhibition chapter “Street Plays – Childhood in Kreuzberg”In the exhibition chapter “Pursued by the Past”In the exhibition chapter “The Administered Life”In the exhibition chapter “Pictures of a District”