Pipes and pipelines in architecture are either a pop symbol—the Berlin Umlauftank, the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie, or the city library in Rotterdam—or they disclose a building’s inner workings, like at the Centre Pompidou. In the Transgas building in Prague, the computer headquarters of the Soviet gas pipeline Brotherhood (Bratstvo), pipes formed the railings, the interior design of the reception, or the proposed seating in the auditorium. 

Transgas anticipates the topic of a new exhibition, “Critical Infrastructures,” at Vi Per Gallery in Prague. The show highlights “nurturing tissues—structures we construct that feed us, without noticing, how they enslave us,” note the curators. Three artists elaborate on presences, absences and ghosts of oil infrastructure. Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas capture the psychogeography of the Friendship (Druzhba) pipeline. The largest Soviet infrastructure project opened in 1964, transporting Siberian oil to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Germany. It upheld economic control over the Soviet Bloc and is still in operation today. A storyboard, and a travel diary are an attractive medium: Oil drops form comic bubbles, connecting historical, popular and political strands in a matrix of references—Russian and American businessmen characters, children’s film tutorials, or the Yalta Druzhba Sanatorium, formally an assembly of gears, possibly a semiotic architecture hint. Tytus Szabelski-Różniak photographs the emerging and disappearing pipeline, a predominantly invisible human intervention into landscape. He denotes the limits of an investigation of critical infrastructures—they are often physically invisible and inaccessible. Rado Ištok and Jiří Žák narrate the story of an unrealised Czechoslovak oil raffinery in Daura. Surprisingly, Czechoslovakia built up Iraq’s oil infrastructure from 1960s. The tipping point came with 1989, as the companies left the market. An illusion technique, Pepper’s ghost, makes the model of the Daura raffinery, its destillation towers and pipelines, appear in front of the viewer, along with the unresolved Czech–Iraqui oil business. The artworks leave one wondering, is there a way to mine the topic further?

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