EXHIBITION
The indefinite continued progress of existence and events (that occur in apparently irreversible succession)
2012, Plexiglass box, paper, dust, 150 × 100 × 15 cm
Exhibition view, New Acquisitions, S.M.A.K., Ghent

Realized in collaboration with an elderly woman prisoner in the Czech Republic. Over a two-week period, she gathered a fragile layer of dust, later transferred onto paper and sealed within a plexiglass box. The artist’s intervention remains deliberately minimal, a thin frame placed upon reality itself. The ephemeral dust functions as both trace and relic. It is rendering visible the otherwise imperceptible passage of time. Within the context of the prison, a place of confinement, heightened introspection, and altered temporality, Vackar’s work shifts attention toward the subtle poetics of duration. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has described prison as a key mechanism of fear and surveillance in contemporary society. Yet beyond discipline, prison also produces a molecular rupture in lived experience: time inside does not pass as time outside. It becomes a divided temporality, created by human systems rather than cosmic laws, unfolding not in a distant galaxy but within the same planet and timezone, separated only by the architecture of captivity.