Seeking to extend the precedents set by galleries like cointemporary.com, left gallery is a blockchain-based space for the display and dissemination of downloadable objects.

This event marked 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, was 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 was 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 placed 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.

In 2016 left gallery presented works by artists including:

Alexis Anais Avedisian (curated by Nora Khan)
Damon Zucconi
Dorine van Meel
Gene McHugh (collaboration with The Composing Rooms and Version House)
Harm van den Dorpel
Hayal Pozanti
Rita Vitorelli
Ryan Kuo (curated by Nora Khan)
Sean Lockwood
Shawné Michaelain Holloway (curated by Nora Khan)

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»The Future of the Left« is the first of a series of events, exhibitions and presentations on digital art jointly organised by Spike & Yvonne Lambert, intended to address the display, distribution, and collection of digital objects.