Underground is the site for new assemblies
The first edition of the BAAB (Basement Art Assembly Biennial) will debut in Rome
“Most basements aren’t for people. They are for washing machines, cars, wine, or boilers. If kitchens are for cooking, dining rooms are for dining, and bedrooms are for beds, basements tend to be left undefined—they are simply underground. They are out of sight and open to interpretation. When people go there, they are free to do anything.” (Anthony Huberman)
With a wide range of media, site-specific works, installations, performances, films, actions and new productions, the debut edition of Basement Art Assembly Biennial_BAAB_Issue 00 opens in Rome on September 10, 2025 (preview on September 9).
Conceived and curated by Ilaria Marotta and Andrea Baccin, founding directors of CURA., in dialogue with an Advisory Board composed of Nicolas Bourriaud, Jean-Max Colard, Simon Denny, Anthony Huberman and Lumi Tan, BAAB_Issue 00 is set within the limited confines of Basement Roma and some occasional offsite hotspots. Baab is intended as a moving organism, a performing space called to change over time, in a process of transformation, writing and rewriting that develops over its duration, until it becomes a single body and a choral and collective experience.
Carsten Höller, Pill Clock
(Blue and White Pills), 2015. Take me I'm Yours, Kunsthall
Charlottenborg, Denmark, 2016. Photo: Anders Sune Berg
The debut edition of a “self-styled biennial” is thus conceived as the teaser of an ongoing project, which presents itself with its own limits and questions with respect to an ever-changing world. The threshold of a claustrophobic and congested exhibition space becomes the place where to nurture a new critical thought, through energies, connections, experimentations, assemblies and a new sense of community.
“BAAB_Issue 00 is a political act that outlines, highlights, and reveals.” – the curators, Ilaria Marotta and Andrea Baccin, say – “What is brought to light is above all an embryonic, hybrid, metamorphic world, in which roles, times, and actions mix; it is the zero point in which differences and plurality coexist, in which the classical principles of artistic representation are undermined and the open boundaries of a new space of freedom are defined.”
Danielle Brathwaite -
Shirley, Fighting Supremacy, 2024, performance at
TATE modern, London
In an era in which everything tends towards overexposure, Basement Art Assembly Biennial invites us to change perspective and look downwards because “underground is the new institution.”
“Underground is the site for new assemblies. It is a way to imagine alternative futures.”
The first list of participating artists includes: Davide Balula (1978), James Bantone (1992), Cecilia Bengolea (1979), Hannah Black (1981), Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (1995), Vittorio Brodmann (1987), Claudia Comte (1983), Jeremy Deller (1966), Gina Fischli (1989), Gina Folly (1983), Calla Henkel (1988) / Max Pitegoff (1987), Carsten Höller (1961), Karl Holmqvist (1964), David Horvitz (1988), Than Hussein Clark (1981), Mark Leckey (1964), Lily McMenamy (1994), Nyala Moon (1992), Valentin Noujaïm (1991), Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) (1989), Michele Rizzo (1984), Selma Selman (1991), Tobias Spichtig (1982), Nora Turato (1991), Women’s History Museum (Mattie Barringer, 1990 / Amanda McGowan, 1990).
Claudia Comte, After Nature, 2021, Courtesy of the Artist and Museo Nacional
Thyssen - Bornemisza / Photo: Stefan Altenburge
A second list of artists will be unveiled in September, as part of an extensive program of readings, talks, performances and screenings, designed to engage both the local and international art scenes. Each week, the exhibition will be enriched with a growing number of rotating works, actions, and interventions throughout its duration and a social dinner called to involve the community of participating artists, around a cooking session, will conclude the exhibition.
As part of BAAB, Ruggero Pietromarchi presents Sonorama, a sonic device that catalyzes dialogue and connection. Accompanied by a series of mixtapes commissioned from CL, Dr. Pit, Car Culture, it offers a collective and layered sonic experience.
The performing program, that will last for months after the official closing of the exhibition, is co-curated by Ilaria Mancia, while a podcast curated by guest curators will explore the themes of the exhibition over the course of the weeks in dialogue with artists and curators.
Founders CURA. is a curatorial platform and a publishing house, founded in Rome in 2009 by Ilaria Marotta and Andrea Baccin.
Basement Roma is a contemporary art center and nonprofit organization founded by CURA. in 2012, which operates with a spirit of experimentation and artistic freedom, combining critical thinking and publishing. Envisioned as an independent, multidisciplinary, and experimental institution, Basement Roma embodies, within the underground soul of its exhibition space, a spirit of research and radical imagination. Drawing on the historical experiences that have characterized the city’s avant-garde since the late 1960s, Basement Roma redefines, through art and artists, the sense of community and public participation, and the centrality of abandoned, peripheric, and disqualified spaces.
