In her paintings, St Petersburg-born artist Liza Sivakova deals intensively with universal themes such as power, arbitrariness, conflict, injustice and social upheaval. Her works are created from a combination of archive material, symbols and personal experiences, which she condenses into fictional scenarios. This results in atmospherically condensed images that depict historical events and figures in surreal, ambiguous scenes.

In her current series Peace Treaty? the artist explores the concept of the peace treaty and its inherent ambivalence. What does it mean to ‘make peace’? How durable and just are such agreements in historical reality? She scrutinises the peace treaty not as an unambiguous gesture of reconciliation, but as a multi-layered, fragile political act.

We show Peace Treaty? III, which takes up the Potsdam Conference of 1945. Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman and Josef Stalin meet in an alienated, almost dreamlike scene - in which coloured and black-and-white images alternate. This re-enacted moment not only refers to the historical significance of the meeting, but also to its fragile aftermath. The deliberate distortion of history is a central artistic device in Sivakova's painting in order to visualise uncertainties, shifts in power and the fragile nature of political promises.