Simply Left is a pilot study investigating historical and contemporary left-wing positions in art from a multi-scalar perspective. In an evolving landscape where left-wing art, grounded in the demand for basic equality and in the breadth and depth of human existence, is increasingly overshadowed by global confrontations, identity politics, performative activism, and community art absorbed by institutional power, Simply Left asks what relevance left-wing art practice may still hold today. How can their histories help us to confront authoritarianism, re-think artistic agency and imagine new forms of transnational solidarity?
As an ongoing project, Simply Left begins at Meinblau with a performative laboratory, an installation developed together with the ZIP Group collective. Conceived as a living research environment, the installation visualises key questions and evolves through public seminars, screenings, archival materials, research findings, and contributions from invited participants. By bringing together positions from China, North Korea, Germany, the former USSR, and the former Yugoslavia, the seminars in particular focus on practices that challenged authoritarian structures and official state narratives from within left-wing political and cultural traditions. By placing these different histories in dialogue, Simply Left explores their aesthetic and socio-political achievements, contradictions, and limitations.
Simply Left compares critical forms of expression developed within real-socialist societies with subcultural, oppositional, and formally radical practices that emerged in capitalist contexts. In the performative laboratory, the initiators welcome participants and audience to leave in the laboratory any tangible or intangible traces of left-wing art drawn from their own lives and practices. Throughout the laboratory duration, the initiators warmly invite local left-wing art communities to use the space for public or closed-door meetings and discussions. By doing so, the initiators seek to provide a ground for diverse methodologies for thinking about the future of left-wing positions in art.
Ultimately, Simply Left asks: beyond dogma and nostalgia, what can it mean to be left-wing in art today?
SIMPLY LEFT
a performative laboratory on left-wing positions in art
7–14 November 2026 MEINBLAU Projektraum
Pfefferberg Haus 5, Christinenstrasse 18-19, Berlin
Opening: 6 November, 19:00
Seminars and lecture-performances: 7–8 November, 14:00–19:00
Performative laboratory and video archive: 7–14 November, 14:00–19:00
Chto Delat, Bernhard Draz, Gal Kirn, Suzana Milevska, Ellen Pau, Rena Rädle & Vladan Jeremić, Matthias Reichelt, Rosemarie Roque (AsiaVisions, Haring Ibon), Su Wei, Ina Wudtke, Biao Xiang, Yao Heng, Želimir Žilnik, Zhao Chuan / Grass Stage, ZIP Group.
Simply Left is supported by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and Meinblau e.V.
See full program: https://rosalux.rs/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/simply_left_program_buklet_A5_PRESS.pdf
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