Azade Köker is part of the group exhibition Kreuzberg: Art and Migration since 1960 at Gropius Bau, ran between September 10, 2026 – January 17, 2027.
Nowhere were the social and cultural changes of 1960s and 1970s West Germany more powerfully manifest than in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighbourhood. The exhibition brings together works by artists who came to West Berlin to study, through scholarships, or for political, economic and family reasons. Their works explore migration and exile, racism, housing shortages, and the lived realities of so-called guest workers, while also telling stories of solidarity, resistance and empowerment.
Human and machine-like elements merge into a single bronze figure in Azade Köker’s 1987 sculpture Akkordarbeiterin (The Pieceworker). The title refers to a form of remuneration in which wages depend on the number of units produced on an assembly line. Under this scheme, female workers were paid a lower piece-rate than their male counterparts, earning less despite equal productivity. Köker’s sculpture depicts the female worker’s body as an extension of the industrial machinery, bound to its relentless pace. Yet through the figure’s defiant posture, the artist also evokes the women’s solidarity strikes of the 1970s, when migrant and non-migrant female workers joined forces to oppose discriminatory pay practices.
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