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GROUP EXHIBITION
Amor fati
Wood, plastic foil
Installation produced by Zdeněk Sklenář gallery
As a part of Colors of Ostrava festival with over 35 000 visitors
Ostrava, Czech Republic





A tree, tightly bound in industrial shrink wrap, stands as both a monument and a wound, a fossil of the present moment, caught in a cycle of preservation and suffocation. The plastic clings to its surface like a second skin, sealing in its form while denying it breath. This gesture, at once cruel and wasteful, is made consciously, with full awareness of its violence. It is an act of sabotage–quiet, deliberate, and complicit.

Far from innocence, the work implicates the artist himself, who does not claim purity or escape from the logics of overconsumption. Instead, he offers a visible admission of guilt, an aestheticized moment of self-destruction. The wrapped tree becomes a symbol of a damaged covenant between the natural and the synthetic, between care and control. It asks whether beauty can exist without harm, and whether gestures of mourning can also be gestures of change. Suspended in silence, the tree becomes both an accusation and a mirror–inviting us to reflect on what we protect, what we discard, and what we are willing to destroy in the name of preservation. It also confronts the paradox at the heart of artistic practice itself: that while art aspires to ritual, to symbolic meaning and transformation, it remains embedded in the material conditions of its time. The very materials used–here, industrial plastic–speak to a deeper human trajectory of extraction and environmental harm, revealing that even acts of reflection are not free from the systems they seek to critique. It is a matter of choice: Vackar could have used natural materials that honor decay, transience, and renewal–materials that align with ecological rhythms. Instead, he chose otherwise, deliberately employing plastic, thereby contributing to the very cycle of destruction he aim to accuse and examine, in order to accentuate the very topic.