One Hour is Sixty Minutes, and Vice Versa is a functioning clock configured to keep accurate time while its hands move anticlockwise. Its face uses Hindu-Arabic numerals arranged in this reversed direction. Seen directly, the clock appears to run backwards; viewed in the accompanying mirror, its movement returns to the direction conventionally recognised as correct. Yet this correction reverses everything else, including the viewer.
The work separates accuracy from familiarity. The time it displays remains exact, but the visual system through which it is read has been displaced. What initially appears incorrect is simply governed by another internal order, revealing how quickly convention becomes mistaken for natural law.The title restates a mathematical equivalence in both directions: one hour is sixty minutes, and sixty minutes are one hour. Language can reverse the equation without altering its truth. Lived time, however, cannot be reversed. The hands may turn backwards, but no previous moment is restored. The work exposes the distance between duration and the signs invented to measure it.
Clockwise movement is so deeply naturalised that the clock itself has become the linguistic standard by which direction is named. Redirecting its hands makes this concealed authority visible. The Hindu-Arabic numerals introduce another history of circulation: a system that travelled between cultures before becoming globally standard. Rather than opposing East and West, the work places different directions of reading, transmission, and orientation inside a single apparatus.