Eleanor Ekserdjian

Eleanor Ekserdjian (b. 1996, UK) is a painter and film artist whose practice blends moving images with rapid mark-making. 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. Pepe Karmel, author of Abstract Art: A Global History, defined her work as ‘Poetic, elegant and mysterious — a kinetic, subjective transcription of the world into calligraphy.’ She studied Fine Art at The University of Edinburgh and later attended the Royal Drawing School. Her most recent residency in Armenia produced a series of paintings which were exhibited in New York by Messums Gallery, the writer Ben Shakespeare described these works as ‘a glowing meditation on cultural memory and exile.’

Her debut short film Imagined Landscapes was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London in 2025. Imagined Landscapes is the first sight of a landscape the artist had always imagined but had never seen, as someone who grew up in the UK with a curiosity about their Armenian family. The film shows through a series of still camera shots, landscapes and medieval monasteries, alternately experienced as ancient spaces or as sites of modern conflict. Imagined Landscapes explores cultural memory through landscape and examines our shifting ideas of homeland from the perspective of diaspora.