November 6, 2024
Vi Per Gallery
Vítkova 2, Prague 8
Czech Republic
A lecture by Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas as part of the opening of the exhibition Critical Infrastructures.
The Druzhba pipeline has been the subject of research by the artistic couple Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas since 2003. They perceive the pipeline as embodying the distribution and organization of power relations that change over time and in the physical space comprising several thousand kilometers of pipeline. They attribute to the monumental structure its own metabolism, as if it really were an organism that pumps, transforms, digests, distributes and regurgitates. In the installation they use information gathered from available archival materials or interviews and project it into texts, videos and objects. Their installations bear witness not only to the original intention to build a network that, notwithstanding the euphemistic name Druzhba (Friendship), employs strategies of colonization and domination, but also to the impact the collapse of the Soviet Union had and is still having on such infrastructure and the communities linked with it. Subsequent privatization has symbolically shifted what had been a state-controlled instrument of power into private hands, where it is completely beyond public control.
Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas are artists, educators, and co-founders of the Urbonas Studio, an interdisciplinary research practice that facilitates exchange amongst diverse nodes of knowledge production and artistic practice in pursuit of projects that transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries. They have exhibited internationally including the São Paulo, Berlin, Moscow, Lyon, Gwangju, Busan, Taipei and Kaunas Biennales, Folkestone Triennial, Manifesta and Documenta exhibitions, with solo shows at the Venice Biennale, MACBA in Barcelona and National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, among others. Gediminas is Associate Professor in the Art, Culture, and Technology program at MIT, and Nomeda is Research Affiliate at MIT.
The event is an accompanying event of the exhibition Critical Infrastructures, co-organized by the National Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning. The exhibition is a part of the “Networks of Support” project, financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland under the Inspiring Culture Program.
