Time Thief—Half Time Project

Time is stolen from one person. In a soccer game, a futsal game, a boxing match, and a basketball game, one player is not told that the match has been cut to half its usual length. Everyone else knows—the referee, the opponent, the coach, the other players—and everyone else keeps it that way. On a full-size pitch, each forty-minute half is played in twenty: eighty minutes of football becomes forty. The half-time break is not touched. It runs the usual fifteen minutes—the only honest stretch of time in the match.

A prank on television ends with the reveal, and the reveal is what it was after: the reaction of the person who was fooled. Nothing is revealed here. The player hears the whistle, walks back to the bench, and goes home believing he played a full match. The work is not interested in his surprise, because there is none.

It is interested in the fact that half a match was removed from a person's life without his knowing, and that no one gave it back. In the gallery, you and the player on screen are given the same stretch of time: the match runs from the first whistle to the last, and you both go through all of it. To him it was an ordinary full match, and nothing in his manner suggests the smallest doubt. You can measure the time; he cannot. Two different lengths of time occupy one duration. Where the missing half went is the question the work leaves open.