The suggestive and descriptive titles of Kotlár's latest projects, formulated in the first person, are not an open invitation to glimpse into the artist's inner world, but rather allow us to identify with or distance ourselves from a given statement, to form a kind of relationship with it. This is also the case with sometimes i like to go to the gym with my hair loose, which describes not only the liberating feeling of breaking an unwritten norm of fitness body etiquette in a given context. It also refers to a specific space that has a certain purpose, equipment, and the aforementioned codes of conduct. However, in the gallery space, we do not see the machines for disciplining and perfecting the body, but instead objects referring to changing rooms – places of short temporary visits for the purpose of transformation. Kotlár thus creates a simulation of a transitional liminal space that needs a body to be activated. 

The installation is characterized by the colour green, which is used in photography, advertising and film as a background – a so-called green screen for the subsequent projection/keying of a digitally created environment onto a monochrome surface. This color is also used because it differs most from the color of human skin. The artificiality of the color and the space transformed by it thus serves as a gateway for possible projections featuring human figure, but in Kotlár's work, it remains in its unanimated technical state. Similarly non-interactive are the components of objects that refer in their form to service and utility objects, but within both parts of Kotlár's installation they remain an allusive reference to larger frameworks – norms, competitiveness, physical discipline and purity – shattered by confusion over their (non)functionality or multiplied to negate their uniqueness.

object
various sizes
wood, stain, acrylic paint, mother of pearl, leaf gold
2024-

*installation view at Atchin Than; Willa Oksza, Muzeum Tatrzańskie w Zakopanem, Zakopane, PL; 2024

During summer of 2024 I took part in a symposium organised by Fundacja Jaw Dikh in Rzepiska, Poland. These objects are directly inspired by the chapels found in the area, that are being built by the residents in front of their homes and serve as spiritual protection. I became increasingly interested in this subject, since while a house itself serves as a shelter for our physical safety, i assume these chapels are supposed to deliver spiritual one - bring a peace of mind, a warmness and calmness to the house. I actually very appreciate the idea of building a talisman to look after you, after all, it is very typical for people accross various cultures to put meaning into objects. I was working with physical form of these chapels, which when stripped down to their bare shape suddenly become very obscure and inherently queer objects, leaving the viewer questioning their purpose. They might be reminiscent of a dollhouse, a birdfeeder, an actual cabinet etc. While the arrows keep showing the directions, without the information provided it’s impossible to know where the roads are leading. The viewer is left with the idea of having to choose a path, while not knowing what is at the end. These objects, robbed of their original religious meaning, might still be able to bring a sense of fellowship and hope.

*installation view at Atchin Than; Willa Oksza, Muzeum Tatrzańskie w Zakopanem, Zakopane, PL; 2024

*installation view at The New Stage, National Theatre, Prague, CZ; 2025; commissioned by Ara Art

I conceived the project "last summer i have fallen in love madly" as a performative multimedia installation in the space of a drained swimming pool. My work has long been concerned with concepts of non-normative time and space, emanating primarily from the field of queer theory. The period after the end of the summer season is associated with a cooling of the climate, an intense return to work and school duties, and seasonal affective disorder. The swimming pool, as a space primarily intended for public relaxation and/or sport, is often tied to a set of individual memories that are largely associated with childhood, family life and collective activities. In its emptied/non-functional form, it loses the purpose of its own existence and loses its justification. A popular public place becomes a dreary and disturbing space which in turn disturbs and/or poses a direct physical threat. It becomes a space that is inherently non-normative, and as a result has the potential to exist autonomously outside of established social patterns.


The installation in the swimming pool area is formally based on stage design. The original sketches for the project, which I have been gradually developing since October 2022, include objects installed directly in the pool area. These objects were partly based on the concept of scaffolding, construction, or reconstruction of the space. The installation was to include ladders and platforms into which glass panels, doors, lightboxes and other objects were embedded to imaginatively divide the space. Gradually I came to the conclusion that the conceptual framework of the whole project does not stand on the objects that I bring into the pool area.

On the contrary, each new artifact in the space, although it adds a new contextual layer, is not a carrier of the main meaning itself. I decided to leave the pool space empty, filled only with the "necessary" technical equipment (i.e. light and sound) that directly encourage the expectation of performative action.

Around the pools, imaginary communities are formed. It is common that if you regularly visit a swimming pool close to where you live, you meet the same people, just like in cafés, fitness centres or even public transport. If the swimming pool area in its transformed form becomes emptied, its function of building an imaginary community can be restored precisely by embracing it as our own at every stage of its cycle. In its emptied form, we have the opportunity to find new uses for it, new ways of spending time together and thus unconventional ways of establishing and strengthening social relations.


Today, October 17, is the brightest full supermoon of 2024. The October full moon symbolizes the definitive end of the summer season, which is why it is also called the "Hunter's Moon" in Western culture, and is associated with the preparation of supplies for the winter (however, it carries various other names and meanings in different cultures). Today's event can therefore be understood as an imaginary closing of the summer season and its related activities, or, on the contrary, it can be understood as an opening of the collective imagination in connection with a space that has ceased to serve us at first glance in its current state.

object
150x200x50cm
analog photography, digital print, stainless stell, plexiglass, LED
2024

Untitled (Climber) is an object that operates at the intersection of image, structure, and embodied perception. The work is defined by a large-scale printed image encased within a surrounding metal construction. The image captures waves breaking along a shoreline, frozen in a moment of motion. While the scene initially evokes romantic associations, it simultaneously carries an undercurrent of unease. Through this ambivalence, the artist draws attention to climate catastrophe, the regenerative and destructive capacities of nature, and humanity’s persistent inability—or refusal—to either protect the natural world or extricate itself from its consequences. Superimposed on the image is the phrase “we are so bound by time. by its order.” Quoted from Denis Villeneuve’s film Arrival (2016), the text gestures toward the present moment while invoking the disproportion between the brevity of individual human existence and the vast temporal scale of geological and cosmic time. In this context, the quotation underscores the instability of linear conceptions of time and space, exposing the limits of human perception and understanding. In contrast to the fluid, organic imagery, the surrounding metal structure is sharp, austere, and markedly industrial. Its defining element is a ladder that frames the image from behind. The structure is unmistakably anthropocentric in scale and design: its intended mode of use is immediately legible, and the viewer can almost physically sense the coldness of metal against the skin. As such, the object anticipates performative engagement—an action that is implied rather than fully realized. Although the form suggests playfulness and interaction, it ultimately speaks to absence, restraint, and deferred action. Interpretation of the object remains inherently subjective, yet it is clearly conceived as a physical confrontation between viewer and structure. Exceeding the viewer’s bodily dimensions, the work invites reflection not only through spatial presence but also through self-recognition: the plexiglass surface reflects the viewer’s image, implicating them within the work’s conceptual framework.

(The ladder is, notably, climbable.)

This object was originally presented during site/time-specific event “last summer i have fallen in love madly” that took place on October 17 2024 at Summer swimming pool Mičurín in Bratislava, Slovakia. It was funded by Slovak Arts Council in a form of stipend and Bratislava City Foundation.

*installation view at OFF Bratislava; OD Prior, Bratislava, SK; 2025

*installation view at Under a Shared Fragile Roof; Slovenský institut Praha, Prague, CZ; 2024

*installation view at last summer i have fallen in love madly; Summer swimming pool Mičurín, Bratislava, SK; 2024

Over the past several years, my writing and artistic practice have repeatedly returned to the notion of a multiplicity of crises as a defining condition of the present. Rather than a single rupture, contemporary life appears structured by overlapping states of instability—ecological, political, technological, and affective. Uncertainty emerges as the dominant experiential mode, operating simultaneously on individual and collective scales, producing a pervasive atmosphere of anticipatory anxiety. Within this context, my work has increasingly engaged with questions of temporality: how, in the absence of a legible or reliable future, attention collapses into the immediacy of the present moment, displacing long-term projection and planning in favor of heightened perception of what is unfolding now.

The exhibition 'something’s wrong and i can feel it' is conceived in direct dialogue with the architectural and symbolic specificity of the New Synagogue. By uncovering an existing aperture in the dome, the building is reconfigured as a camera obscura—a primordial optical apparatus that predates photography and situates vision within a pre-industrial epistemology of light and observation. When the interior is sufficiently darkened, the sky above the synagogue is projected onto the floor beneath the dome, transforming the sacred interior into a site of inversion and transference. The image—composed of shifting atmospheric conditions—is unstable, contingent, and beyond the artist’s control. Its apprehension demands time, attentiveness, and a gradual physiological adjustment to altered visual conditions, foregrounding perception as a durational and embodied process.

The observation of the sky is echoed in the fountain installed in one of the synagogue’s towers. Made from industrial materials, the fountain holds a bucket and a moon, referencing a Romani custom of bowing to the new moon. In this tradition, men carried a bucket filled with water and small coins, believing that as the moon grew, so would their wealth (Lacková, Elena. I Was Born Under a Lucky Star. 2023).The choice of industrial materials reflects contemporary Romani realities in Central Europe, where many men today work in construction. By translating a ritual gesture into the material language of labor and infrastructure, the fountain connects ancestral belief systems with present-day economic conditions.

This simple act recalls a gesture of collective memory and belief, while offering a moment of pause—an acknowledgment of impermanence, repetition, and the quiet persistence of ritual in everyday life.

The marble panels installed in the second tower are engraved with daily inscriptions generated by Co–Star, an astrology application that translates my natal chart into a continuous stream of textual prompts—part mantra, part directive. These utterances are produced through a hybrid apparatus that fuses astrological symbolism with artificial intelligence and large-scale data processing, recoding ancient cosmological systems through contemporary computational logics.The work draws attention to the persistence and mutation of superstition across historical epochs: from celestial divination and mythic cosmologies to algorithmically mediated forms of belief. It examines how meaning continues to be ascribed to cosmic objects through interfaces that obscure their technological infrastructure behind the rhetoric of intuition, personalization, and fate. In this sense, the application operates as a secular oracle—an AI-driven proxy for mysticism—whose authority occupies an ambiguous position between irrational belief and data-driven rationality.By inscribing these machine-generated utterances into marble—a material historically associated with monumentality, permanence, and institutionalized knowledge—the installation stages a temporal collision between the deep time of ancient belief systems and the accelerated, disposable rhythms of digital culture. The work reflects on how such structures of belief not only persist but proliferate within late-capitalist, technologically saturated societies, where algorithmic systems increasingly mediate intimacy, subjectivity, and the production of meaning itself.

'something’s wrong and i can feel it' ultimately proposes the exhibition space as a site of deceleration and introspection. It invites the audience into a provisional refuge for embodied awareness—attentive to perception, impermanence, and ephemerality. Visitors are welcome to throw a few pennies into the fountain and read the motivational inscriptions, engaging in gestures that oscillate between irony and sincerity, skepticism and faith. Everything will be all right.

About words beggining with P

I have previously used the term perception many times within my research publications. I must admit that I have been trying to avoid it, perhaps precisely due to its academic tone. If we stopped or are about to stop by the solo exhibition of Ľuboš Kotlár placed in Žilina´s Nová synagóga, it is worth embracing this term again after a certain time.

The concept of perception is best understood if we evalue it with the help of another term - perspective. Perception is not more than receiving certain data through our sensory endings. There is something uncontrollable in this process of "absorption" of the surroundings, a kind of flow - pure seeing or hearing right here, right now and in this environment.

Even these words are slowly pouring into you. Your eyes register the contrast between the white paper and the black font called Lucida Grande. Based on this data, you can compose successive sentences. Perception is therefore "this" manifestation of the world - perception is a stream, by which the World flows into us.

The perspective is radically different, it is aimed at something, it is a specific view. Perspective changes the framework of what we see. While the perception is only one, constantly passing, happening, we can take many perspectives on it. We can observe one thing from several angles and always see it in a different perspective. The camera is an example of this. You simply move it and it will stop this "flow" at your command. Astronomers recently took another photo of the black hole in the M87 galaxy, taking a new perspective, but despite this, the image is very similar to the previous one from 2019. However, there is definitely a small difference in it, which has its own scientific value. But let's leave that aside for now.

If we can comprehend this difference between the words perception and perspective clearly, we can now ask ourselves a simple question - where are we at in the work of Ľuboš Kotlár? Do we perceive, accept this flow, the flowing sky, or do we take perspective? Would our perspective be different if we arrived on a different day? And do we need a perfect image on the floor of Nová synagóga in Žilina, if our "smart" phones can master that?

Untitled (Fountain)
various size
3D print, found metal bucket, found rubble, metal tripod, PVC hose, stepper motor, pump
2024

Untitled (Lapidarium)
200x200cm
engraved marble, dirt, found plant
2024