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 at S.M.A.K., Ghent
Collection of S.M.A.K.


This work was realized in collaboration with an elderly woman serving a prison sentence in the Czech Republic. Over the course of two weeks, she collected a fragile layer of dust, which was later transferred onto paper and sealed within a plexiglass box. The artist’s intervention remains deliberately minimal—a thin frame placed around a fragment of reality itself.

The dust functions simultaneously as trace and relic, rendering visible a process that normally escapes perception: the passage of time. Within the prison environment, where movement is restricted and temporal experience becomes profoundly altered, the work draws attention to the materiality of duration.

While sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described the prison as a central institution of contemporary surveillance and social control, Vackar approaches it through another lens. Confinement produces not only discipline but also a rupture in lived time. The same hours, days, and seasons continue to unfold beyond the prison walls, yet inside they acquire a different density and rhythm. The work materializes this divergence, revealing time not as a universal constant of experience, but as something shaped by social, political, and architectural conditions.