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.

The title of Ľuboš Kotlár’s exhibition is suggestive, descriptive, and articulated in the first person. Yet rather than simply opening a window onto the artist’s private life, it constructs a situation in which viewers may either identify with the statement or consciously distance themselves from it. The phrase sometimes i like to go to gym with my hair loose refers to a seemingly inconspicuous yet emancipatory gesture that unsettles the unwritten codes governing bodily conduct, discipline, and self-presentation within the fitness environment. This everyday statement condenses the tension between individuality and social convention that permeates the installation as a whole.

Going to the gym with one’s hair loose may appear impractical. Hair gets in the way of movement, clings to the perspiring body, and disrupts the ideal of optimised performance. Yet it is precisely this apparent impracticality that becomes a subtle gesture of resistance to a regime in which the body is expected to remain constantly controlled, functional, and performance ready. It opens up the possibility if only momentarily—of stepping outside the logic of efficiency that governs not only bodily movement but also the ways in which the body is socially performed.

The fitness centre is not merely a site of exercise. It is also a space in which the body is observed, compared, measured, and shaped through repetition. The mechanisms of modern disciplinary power organise bodies across space and time, rendering them more efficient while simultaneously making them more governable (Michel Foucault). Kotlár’s installation, however, does not feature machines designed to shape the body; instead, it presents objects that evoke the changing room—a place of temporary pause, of undressing, changing clothes, and transformation.

The changing room exists in the interval between arrival and departure, between one’s public image and the partially exposed body, between preparation and performance itself. It constitutes a liminal space that requires the presence and movement of viewers in order to be activated. The objects evoke familiar utilitarian furnishings, yet their function remains ambiguous. The body is left uncertain whether to pause, conceal itself, set down its belongings, touch the objects, or merely observe them. The learned choreography of the changing room thus gradually begins to unravel.

The ways in which bodies move through space and orient themselves in relation to objects are not neutral. They are shaped by social norms and by their continual repetition (Sara Ahmed). Kotlár unsettles these learned orientations, disrupting our habitual behaviours as well as our assumptions about how we are expected to conduct ourselves within a particular type of space. The dysfunctionality of the objects, therefore, should not be understood as a technical flaw or a sign of incompleteness, but rather as a deliberate artistic strategy.

This approach is closely connected to Kotlár’s long-term artistic practice, which draws on research and the theoretical frameworks of queer temporality and failure as artistic strategies. His work explores failure, dysfunctionality, and liminality as modes of resistance to normative regimes of time, success, and productivity. He relates his practice to “moments when the normative function of space is disrupted or transformed” (Ľuboš Kotlár). Space, therefore, is not conceived as a neutral container into which a finished work is simply placed. Instead, it becomes an active component of the work itself and one of the materials through which the artist operates.

Each new installation transforms not only the specific site but also the work itself. Its meaning, proportions, rhythm of movement, and relationship to the viewer’s body are reconfigured in response to the architecture, former function, and social context of the location. sometimes i like to go to gym with my hair loose was originally created in Trnava for the Oskár Čepan Award 2025. Its presentation at Artivist Lab, however, is not merely the relocation of an existing work from one exhibition venue to another. Rather, the Prague installation constitutes a new iteration of the work, and with it, a new manifestation of its form.

Here, the transformation of the work is not a secondary consequence of its transfer between exhibition spaces, but a fundamental component of the artist’s site-specific strategy. The work has no single definitive form. Instead, it is continually reconstituted through its relationship to a particular place, moment in time, institutional context, and the bodies that encounter it. It changes not in order to become more efficient or more complete, but because it embraces instability, incompleteness, and dependence on a given situation as its defining qualities. This spatial mutability is closely intertwined with queer temporality, which disrupts the linear conception of time as a progression towards a predetermined goal. Within the fitness environment, the present body is often understood merely as an imperfect precursor to its future, stronger, healthier, or more attractive version. Time is organised through training schedules, repetition, measurable outcomes, and the expectation of transformation.

Queer temporality, by contrast, offers a way of understanding time through pause, waiting, return, cyclicality, or delay—through trajectories that need not culminate in a predetermined outcome. Queer time departs from the normative sequence of education, work, partnership, reproduction, and the accumulation of property (Jack Halberstam). Failure, in this context, need not signify deficiency; rather, it can become a means of escaping dominant notions of success, productivity, and social recognition. Time itself is not a neutral medium. It functions as a social organiser of bodies, determining which rhythms of life are considered proper, productive, and valuable (Elizabeth Freeman).

In Kotlár’s installation, the temporality of the changing room is extended. It ceases to function merely as an interval preceding performance and instead becomes the very experience of the work itself. Viewers are invited to remain within a liminal state, inhabiting a space without a singular function and without the imperative to move swiftly from preparation to outcome. Kotlár describes this possibility as follows: “Artistic practice functions as a queer technology of time: as a tool for rejecting a futurity defined by productivity, growth, and reproduction, while simultaneously articulating alternative modes of existence grounded in the present, in dysfunctionality, and in shared experience.” (Ľuboš Kotlár)

A significant visual motif of the installation is the colour green. In photography, film, and advertising, the so-called green screen functions as a backdrop intended to be removed and replaced by another image. In Kotlár’s installation, however, this substitution never takes place. The green surface remains visible, unanimated, and open. Technical images are produced within apparatuses and programmes that predefine the range of possible outcomes (Vilém Flusser). Kotlár, however, leaves this programme incomplete. The prepared backdrop does not generate the expected illusion but remains a surface for potential projections that have yet to be realised. Images, moreover, come to stand between human beings and reality, shaping what we are capable of perceiving as real, memorable, and worthy of attention (Susan Sontag). In this installation, however, the final image of the body is absent. We are not presented with an ideal form towards which we are expected to strive.

Instead, the body emerges not as a completed image of performance but as a mutable, vulnerable, and politically legible presence. Queer temporality can open up, already within the present moment, glimpses of another mode of existence that has not yet been fully realised (José Esteban Muñoz). Such moments may also arise through small gestures that refuse to subject every movement to the imperatives of utility and self-presentation.

sometimes i like to go to gym with my hair loose thus does not construct a space of complete liberation from bodily and social norms. It does, however, allow those norms to fail, if only momentarily. The lockers lose their unequivocal function, the green backdrop refuses to produce an image, and the changing room no longer leads towards the anticipated performance. For a brief moment, the body is able to step outside the programme that compels it towards constant optimisation, existing without the obligation to become a better, more efficient, or more socially acceptable version of itself.