Elisaveta Conlan is a contemporary painter living and working in London. Elisaveta’s paintings explore the theatre of memory, using found images informed by her family history. She uses painting to excavate images from film stills, family photographs, and USSR state video archives. Her work addresses the contemporary urgency of grappling with memory, truth and the nature of images, considering how history and the present are preserved and transferred through digital media. Scale is often cinematic, offering viewers an inescapable view into complex histories. The act of looking persists as a motif through figures witnessing catastrophe, and the viewer observing anonymous performers. Painting from the moving image informs the urgency of the gesture, building a reconstituted space, translating and condensing time and space onto the canvas. By reworking re-enactments and fictionalisations around history, conflict, performance, and disaster, she aims to situate them in the present through their lingering presence in visual culture – connecting contemporary catastrophe to an extended history.