Die Freiheit führt die Jugend 2011

Re-enactment of the historical painting “Liberty Leading the People” by Eugène Delacroix (1830)

Liberty Leading the youth used the famous historical painting "Liberty Leading the People" (1830) by Eugène Delacroix as a starting point for a performative re-enactment with inverse signs. The in oil painted political poster of the French Revolution shows like no other picture of art history that violence and revolution are related and that the Western pictorial tradition, which is full of battle scenes, contains of no visual alternative to violence.

During a performance workshop, I asked the young participants in a studio situation, to develop a peaceful variant without militant items for staging, to transform the image to an own statement of liberty in daily life of young people. The process of content and formal approaches to revolution/violence/freedom is documented in the form of a "making-of" video and shown as a videoinstallation.

Excerpt from the video, original duration 15 min.