Saturday 20 September 2025
An introductory talk and film screening (8 mins) with artist and filmmaker Eleanor Ekserdjian. Followed by a Q&A.
Imagined Landscapes was filmed in Armenia in September 2022 and describes her first sight of a landscape that she had always imagined but never seen. This project came out of her experience of growing up in Britain with a curiosity about Armenia and her family, who left Constantinople in the early twentieth century. Her film records ancient landscapes and monastery complexes that Eleanor’s ancestors may have seen through her eyes, as they are now.
During the filming of Imagined Landscapes, Eleanor experienced being shelled when near the border with Azerbaijan in Goris on 12 September 2022. This is only represented by a tonal change in music while filming at Tatev Monastery, a site which she visited on her journey from Goris. The film turns from black and white to colour near the end of the work, representing the return to colour in her painting during this time in Armenia but also to signal hopefulness for the future of the country.
The work was filmed and edited by Eleanor Ekserdjian. The music used is Alexander Spendiaryan’s Yerevan Etudes, also the first reaction of a Diaspora Armenian seeing their homeland for the first time.
Eleanor is exhibiting in the ‘Land & Source: Memories of Place’ show in New York featuring four artists who have a distinct relationship to place as a source of memories.
