Basement Art Assembly Biennial (BAAB)
Issue 00
September 10 – November 6, 2025
Basement Art Assembly Biennial (BAAB) is a non-profit organization founded by CURA., conceived to make a glitch the institutional dynamics of the art system, and an underground and experimental world, which alludes to the freedom to define new worlds.
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 – a liminal and self-sustaining exhibition space, founded by CURA. in 2012 –, and is intended as a moving organism, a performing space called to change over time, until it becomes a single body and a choral and collective experience. The first draft of a “so-called biennial” thus presents itself with its own limitations and questions with respect to an ever-changing world, in which to nurture a new critical thought, and activate energies, connections, experimentations, languages, and a new sense of community. 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”.
“BAAB Issue 00 is a political act that outlines, highlights, and reveals. 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. It’s the site for new assemblies. It is a way to imagine alternative futures.”
First list of participating artists
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), Aziz Hazara (1992), 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).
An extensive interdisciplinary program of readings, talks, workshops and screenings, designed to engage both the local and international art scenes will unveil the full list of artists, guest curators and protagonists in September 2025.
A musical section curated by Ruggero Pietromarchi and composed of a series of mixtapes commissioned for the occasion is called upon to create a collective and stratified sound experience within the exhibition space. The performing section is co-curated by Ilaria Mancia.
The exhibition is accompanied by the edition 00 of BAAB newspaper, published by CURA. which includes texts by the curators, Nicolas Bourriaud, Anthony Huberman, Lumi Tan, and Jean-Max Colard.
Founders and organizers
CURA. is a leading platform for critic, editorial, and curatorial practice, founded in Rome in 2009 by Ilaria Marotta and Andrea Baccin.
Basement Roma is a center for contemporary art and a non-profit organization founded by CURA. in 2012, which operates with a spirit of experimentation and artistic freedom, between critical thinking and publishing. Imagined as a multi-disciplinary, experimental and independent art institution, Basement Roma embodies in the underground soul of its space a spirit of research, experimentation and radical imagination. Drawing on 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.