The scenographic installations of Tomáš Svoboda /1974/ betray his work as a film architect. However, the illusion he constructs using sound, text, and stage sets is always incomplete. In his videos, the picture often cuts out, and carefully staged situations lack actors who might act them out. He merely subtitles reality, and creates the story’s dynamics through editing. His works become complete only by interacting directly with an audience. As a result, Svoboda’s film only gets fully going in our heads. Each time, it is a different film, often even a different genre, directed entirely by our free association. Where he strips cinematic language down to the bone and resigns on its strongest /visual/ component, he often complements the truncated text with installations that meticulously replace reality while shifting and transforming the context of the particular exhibition space. He literally pulls the viewer into the action. Each exhibition by Tomáš Svoboda is thus a perfect, time-limited Gesamtkunstwerk. Svoboda’s site-specific installation at Galerie Laboratorio is unabashedly egocentric. At its center is the first person singular. Here, “singular” is a fitting description, as it relates not only to the artist, but also to each individual viewer. According to Freund, man exists in permanent tension with his surroundings. We spend all our lives engaged in a moral struggle between delight and guilt, between individual desire and societal expectations. According to scientists, we focus most intensively on our “I”, our self, during infancy /the Freudian Id/, adolescence, and our mid-life crisis /which is of a different duration for different people/. Naturally, we can spend all day talking about egoism, i.e., “I-ism”. But here we would be dealing with diagnosis /it is no coincidence that the term egoism is often used to describe artists/ or belief in the peculiar philosophy of radical solipsism, which is based on the idea that the only reality that exists is my consciousness and nothing else. The central element of the exhibition First Person Singular is a video installation in which Svoboda dryly describes his daily routine. Through this spiritual archeology, he exhumes his own life, submerged in a sea of more or less banal activities. Neutral verbs reveal nothing of the artist’s state of mind. It is an approach similar to lying on the psychoanalyst’s couch: An associative chain of text, unedited by reason, whose pace is adjusted by the patient himself. Emotional ramparts are presented in the form of visual interventions that the artist has purposefully ordered alogically in order to keep his and our analyst on his toes. Svoboda’s exhibition culminates with an installation on the roof of the Electric Company building that lets the viewer express his own ego to the full, and thus become, if only for a few minutes, an integral part of the exhibition. The solo project “First Person Singular” includes not only the exhibition in the gallery and the site-specific installation on the roof, but also an art project on the pages of the first issue of Rajón / Art in Your Neighborhood and Beyond which Laboratorio is publishing in collaboration with the m.odla and Berlinskej Model galleries.