Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė – Spit and Image

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Spit and Image marks the first solo exhibition in Rome by the artist duo Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė.

They work collaboratively across painting, sculpture, performance, and installation to 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 practice is rooted in the act of translation between bodies and images, between code and gesture, between the visible and the invisible.

“Spit and Image”—writes Yang Beichen in the exhibition text—“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 backgrounds within a vision of “ancestrality”: instead of indulging nostalgia, they endeavor to reactivate marginalized 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 marginalized and nameless, embracing the fluid identities and multiple possibilities of narratives. In this sense, Spit and Image manifests a complex state of in-betweenness. The corporeal distortions and metamorphoses may evoke a new trance-like experience—one that seeks to reclaim agency and sovereignty from the domination of algorithms and capital. A monstrous body rises to combat an equally uncanny reality, a fragmented self resists the controllable and replicable life, a radical doppelgänger dissolves institutionalized identities and morphs into a Frankensteinian hybrid of supernatural and technology—an object of terror and worship at once. The cosmology of Spit and Image is precisely 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. Instead of offering a simple answer, the artists strive to create an unceasing fluxion, a promise of ever-renewing transformation, a persistent yet unstable site of perception anchored in the turbulent flow of uncertainty.”

Dorota Gawęda (b. 1986, PL/CH) and Eglė Kulbokaitė (b. 1987, LT/CH) both graduated from the Royal College of Art in London. They have exhibited internationally, notably: MACA, Beijing; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris; Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris; Vilnius Biennial; Kunsthalle Mainz; Kunstverein Hamburg; Istituto Svizzero, Palermo/Milan; Swiss Institute, New York; Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf; Kunsthalle Fribourg; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Athens Biennale; Kunsthalle Basel; ICA, London; 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.

Produced by Basement Roma

Exhibition text
Yang Beichen

Press office
Maddalena Bonicelli

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Basement Roma is a non-profit organization
and a center for contemporary art run by CURA.

Basement Roma is part of the programme Cultura Lituana in Italia 2025–2026, implemented by the Lithuanian Culture Institute and the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in the Italian Republic.

In partnership with
Istituto Svizzero

Thanks to
Indipendenza
Soho House Rome

Media Partner
ZERO

The exhibition programme is made possible thanks to public and private supporters. Write here if you wish to support Basement Roma exhibition programme.