Elisaveta Conlan (b.2001, Berlin, Germany) is a contemporary painter living and working in Glasgow, Scotland, UK. Elisaveta’s paintings explore the theatre of memory, using found images informed by her Slavic heritage — excavating film stills, family photographs, and USSR state video archives. Her work addresses the contemporary urgency of grappling with memory, truth and the nature of (photographic) images, considering how history and the present are preserved and transferred through mostly digital media. Scale is often cinematic, offering viewers an inescapable view into dark, ambiguous histories. The act of looking persists as a motif through figures witnessing catastrophe, and the viewer observing anonymous performers. Painting from the moving image creates new and reconstituted space, translating and condensing time and space into mark-making. By reworking re-enactments and fictionalised histories around war, performance, and disaster, she aims to situate them in the present through their contemporary politics – connecting contemporary catastrophe to an extended history.