Injury Time

It is difficult to define the strange reality we have been living in since 2020. Is it an era of post-truth? Of blurred boundaries? As early as 1967, theorist Guy Debord described the “society of the spectacle” as a system in which authentic life is replaced by representation. More recently, Byung-Chul Han introduced the term “hyperculture” to describe a culture characterized by the erosion of boundaries, hybridization, and the detachment of cultural products from their origins.
Beyond the central role militarism occupies in Israeli society—and its inherent associations with masculinity, combat, national ethos, and the defense of the homeland—once design enters the picture, the military object becomes an object of desire: finishes, textures, smart materials, and more. The exhibition explores the blurring of boundaries between the military and sport through a series of semi-imagined hybrid objects. War and play—similar, distinct, or conflicting systems of rules—hover over the display and find expression through structural manipulations of the objects themselves.
We present a subjective design-historical genealogy of sports equipment and rackets that have migrated from the military sphere, driven by the recognition that sporting goods are, in many ways, a sublimation or material transformation of weapons, and that sport itself can be understood as a transformation of war—its refinement and distancing from direct violence. These hybrids, combining instruments of war with sporting equipment, create a shared space that is at once merged, ambiguous, and deceptive.

Are these objects inventions, or products from a legitimate website we might rush to order from before the collection sells out?