Basement Art Assembly Biennial (BAAB)

Basement Art Assembly Biennial (BAAB) is a non-profit organization founded by CURA. in 2025, conceived to create a “glitch” between the institutional dynamics of the art world, the editorial roots of the exhibition space and an underground and experimental world, which alludes to the freedom to define new worlds. Organized within the tight boundaries of Basement Roma, a liminal and self-sustaining exhibition space founded by CURA. in 2012, Basement Art Assembly Biennial is intended as an organism in motion, a performing space called to shape itself 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. The first edition of BAAB Issue 00 opens in September 2025 and is intended as the teaser of a project in the making, in which to reach a reset in order to reconstruct and investigate, through a new gaze, the most relevant themes of contemporaneity. The first draft of a “self-styled biennial” thus 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, assemblages and a new sense of community. The assembly of works will be enriched by a weekly public program, designed to engage both the local and international art scenes, fostering a dialogue across languages, fields, disciplines, and mediums. 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”. The exhibition is accompanied by a book published by CURA. and by an extensive program of readings, talks, and screenings.

Founders
CURA. is a leading platform for critic, editorial, and curatorial practice, founded in Rome in 2009 by Ilaria Marotta and Andrea Baccin.

Location
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 avant-garde and experimental 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.

Issue 00
Chief Curators
Ilaria Marotta, Andrea Baccin (CURA.)

Advisory Board
Nicolas Bourriaud, curator and writer
Simon Denny, artist
Lumi Tan, curator and writer

Brand Identity
Sometimes Always

The list of artists and associate curators will be announced in June 2025.

Opening dates
September 9–10, 2025
Through November 6, 2025