Artist: Eleanor Ekserdjian

We Are Our Mountains is the first solo presentation of the work of Eleanor Ekserdjian at Messums London. Ekserdjian is a painter and film artist whose practice blends moving images with rapid mark-making. The exhibition explores cultural memory through landscape and examines our shifting ideas of homeland from the perspective of diaspora.

Ekserdjian first travelled to Armenian in 2022, where she shot her debut film Imagined Landscapes (2024). The film portrays her first sight of Armenia, a landscape that she had always imagined but had never seen, as someone who grew up in the UK with a curiosity about her Armenian family. A series of still camera shots show landscapes and medieval monasteries, alternately experienced as ancient spaces or as sites of modern conflict. Imagined Landscapes was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in December 2025.

On returning to the UK from Armenia, Ekserdjian began painting both from her film and from the memory of being in Armenia and the landscape around her at her studio in Sussex. She describes these works as ‘simultaneous landscape’, saying: ‘to me it feels much more true to the way we all experience the world.’ This process results in abstract works that blend fluid motion with striking precision, capturing both a sense of calm and dynamic movement. Her paintings and drawings evolve into lyrical landscapes that explore shifting emotional responses to film, creating a visual dialogue between stillness and motion.

In 2025 Ekserdjian returned to Armenia to continue filming medieval monastery spaces, this time travelling to Northern Armenia to see the frescoed churches near the border with Georgia. On her return she made a series of paintings which were exhibited in New York by Messums as a part of the exhibition Land & Source: Memories of Place. These were described by writer Ben Shakespeare: ‘Her recent residency in Armenia produced a series of paintings which are a glowing meditation on cultural memory and exile.’

We Are Our Mountains will include simultaneous landscape paintings combining Armenia and the UK, and a new film and sound installation, exploring the role of landscape and architecture in cultural memory and contemporary political narratives concerning land disputes.