Ariela Plotkin

Born in Rishon LeZion, 1976
Lives and works in Ramat Gan and Tel Aviv

Delacroix's painting Liberty Leading the People features the bold young figure of Marianne, and Ariela Plotkin follows suit. She films herself bare chested, waving a yellow flag that has no symbolic meaning while moving forward slowly from the depth of the frame to the forefront. The bodies lying at the feet of Liberty in Delacroix's painting are replaced, in Plotkin's video work, by young men and women walking across the frame, accentuating the diagonal thrust of the image; one figure carries a toy deer, another carries a violin, and a welder is seen working in the background. For Plotkin, it seems, liberty is synonymous with art, and art alone may be viewed as a form of redemption.


Marianne

The French symbol of liberty

Representations of women have often served as allegorical figures personifying abstract ideas. Marianne, who is part of this tradition, is a personification of liberty whose origins go back to the French Revolution: the day following the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, the revolution came to be identified with a female figure wearing a red Phrygian cap (a soft bonnet with the top pulled forward). The name Marianne was given to her only in the mid-nineteenth century, after she was captured in Eugטne Delacroix's famous painting Liberty Leading the People (1830).
This personification of female liberty had two versions: the first - young, ardent, and depicted in movement with her chest exposed - was viewed as a popular and extremist symbol; the second, who was older and more restrained, wearing a long dress that covered her body, represented less radical revolutionary views. Both figures wear the red Phrygian cap. Following the fall of the monarchy, this image of liberty - whose changing appearance reflected the changing spirit of the time - replaced the image of the king as a symbol of government on the official seal of the Republic.