the future of the left
left gallery launched at the spike art quarterly & yvonne lambert space in berlin.
Seeking to extend the precedents set by galleries like cointemporary, Left Gallery is a blockchain-based space for the display and dissemination of downloadable objects.
This event marks the official launch of the gallery, which has been in operation since 2015. Harm van den Dorpel, the gallery’s co-founder, with Paloma Rodríguez Carrington, will be present for a discussion of the roots and aims of the project, which grew out of an experience he had producing the work "Event Listeners" (2015) for the Austrian Museum of Applied and Contemporary Arts (MAK). The creation of the work marked the first recorded occasion on which an artwork was purchased by a museum using the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
The event will be accompanied by a meal prepared by van den Dorpel consisting of gado gado with marbled eggs — Indonesian specialties which became familiar to Europeans as the advance of Dutch colonialism subsumed the territory known today as Indonesia. The foregrounding of the dish’s colonial origins not only places an elided aspect of European history in the spotlight, but also seeks to explore the quasi colonial relations that are increasingly being built into the Internet’s infrastructure, a mentality Left Gallery seeks to confront and oppose.