2012 | Video
In fairytales the hero’s path is the site for miraculous transformation, the place he finds himself and his life. The neoliberal path also holds the potential for us to become heroes, shining stars, unique snowflakes – on the condition we walk only that route charted and laid out for us.
Orpaz’s video work is shot from the viewpoint of a hero as he walks along a snowy path toward the horizon, but the horizon keeps shifting like the background of a computer game. The horizon is an engineered landscape comprised of ever-changing images - snowy mountains, the scorched remains of a city, a watchtower. The varying images transform the open landscape of this horizon into an impasse, and the great outdoors into limbo.
To walk along this path is a desperate search for a destination we will never reach. We adjust and acclimatize to the image projected before us, but it forever remains beyond our grasp. Existence, as implied in the work’s title, is just another level in a computer game, a promise to set an unattainably high score. Life is but a false expectation for the impossible.
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