Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė | Basement Roma
Basement Roma presents Spit and Image, the first solo exhibition in Rome by the artist duo Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė.
Working collaboratively across painting, sculpture, performance, and installation, Gawęda and Kulbokaitė explore the porous boundaries between the body, technology and the environment. Their practice considers how identity and embodiment are shaped through networks — both digital and ecological — and how the spectral, the sensorial and the collective intertwine within these systems. Their work is rooted in the act of translation between bodies and images, between code and gesture, between the visible and the invisible.
Spit and Image, while originally signifying “perfect likeness,” is here expanded to suggest a nuanced doubleness — one that creates polyphonic and polyporous dimensions within a seemingly repetitive and mirrored structure. The exhibition space is transformed into an ambiguous zone of liminality, in which perceptual boundaries dissolve into a site of superimposition, entanglement, and chaos.
Self and doppelgänger, body and technology, real and virtual, scent and mist: as various materialities and temporalities permeate and traverse this realm, a speculative contemporary hauntology emerges. The artists position their Slavic and Baltic cultural background within a vision of “ancestrality”: instead of indulging nostalgia, they endeavour to reactivate marginalised non-modern subjectivities through re-choreographed forms.
Central to this constellation is the figure of the upiór, a vampire possessing dual souls, an Other lingering between life and death, human and non-human, which carries the whispering of the marginalised and nameless, embracing the fluid identities and multiple possibilities of narratives. Spit and Image manifests a complex state of in-betweenness — a monstrous body rising to combat an equally uncanny reality, a fragmented self resisting the controllable and replicable life, a radical doppelgänger dissolving institutionalised identities into a Frankensteinian hybrid of supernatural and technology.
The cosmology of Spit and Image is grounded in this dialectical openness, merging into a diffuse constellation in which witchcraft coexists with algorithms and horror dwells with poetry, while specters of the past resonate with projections of the future in a labyrinth of mirrors, mist, membranes, and scents.
About the Artists
Dorota Gawęda (b. Poland, based in Switzerland) and Eglė Kulbokaitė (b. Lithuania, based in Switzerland) both graduated from the Royal College of Art in London. They have exhibited internationally at MACA, Beijing; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris; Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris; Vilnius Biennial; Kunsthalle Mainz; Istituto Svizzero, Palermo/Milan; Swiss Institute, New York; Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Athens Biennale; Kunsthalle Basel; ICA, London; and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, among others. They are the founders of the YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP (2013–2021), recipients of the Allegro Artist Prize 2022, CERN Collide Residency 2022, and laureates of the Swiss Performance Art Award 2021.
Curated by CURA.
Exhibition text by Yang Beichen. Supported by Pro Helvetia. Part of the Cultura Lituana in Italia 2025–2026 program by the Lithuanian Culture Institute. In partnership with Istituto Svizzero.
April 28 – July 10, 2026
Photo by Daniele Molajoli. Courtesy of the artists and Basement Roma.
Basement Roma
Viale Mazzini 128, 00195 Rome
basementroma.org