Building, singing, speaking, dancing–across and against the capitalist division of labour–Michael Turinsky subverts not only the separation of mental and manual labour, but also the boundaries between choreographic intervention, concert and political agitation. Work Body is inspired by the poem The Ashes of Gramsci, which Pier Pasolini dedicated to the Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci, who was also physically disabled. Turinsky uses Pasolini’s sensual and intellectual homage to the Marxist thinker to find in Work Body an answer to the general shift to the right in the working-class milieu, which is permeated by fantasies of masculinity. Looking at the ‘authentic core’ of the proletarian experience, as emphasised by Gramsci; what about the dormant longing to socialise autonomously, and with those one identifies with? What about the erotic, but also narcissistic undertones of camaraderie and brotherhood? And how does communist desire relate to sexual desire?

Work Body creates a space for resonances between the ‘disabled’ and ‘working’ body. Turinsky thus shifts the physicalities that are pushed to the margins of representation to the centre of our attention.

Michael Turinsky is a Vienna-based physically disabled artist. As choreographer, theorist and curator, he is one of the most important disabled movement thinkers in the German-speaking world. Academically trained as a philosopher at the University of Vienna, Michael began immersing himself in the world of inclusive dance in 2006. He later questioned the term inclusion and coined his own term ‘Crip Choreography’ to describe his unique artistic practice, which deals with the specific, resistant materiality of the body in processes of subversion, de-organisation and re-organisation of dominant movement forms and qualities. His solo work Precarious Moves was awarded the prestigious Nestroy Prize for Best Off-Production in 2021. In 2023 he was honoured as ‘Outstanding Artist’ by the Austrian Ministry of Culture.