Eléonore de Montesquiou

French artist (born 1970)
Eesti Kunstimuuseum

Eleonore de Montesquiou (1979) is an Estonian-French artist, whose films focus on the relationship between people's life stories and their official history, as well as on personal and national identity. Her works take a documentative approach, expressed through film, drawing and text. Montesquiou is a socially sensitive artist, using empiric research methods like interview, observation and archival materials. One of Montesquiou's first exhibitions, “My home is my castle” (Tallinn Art Hall Gallery, 2002) focused on telling stories about home. The artist interviewed people of various ages living in Tallinn, asking them to talk about the history and current usage of their language in their mother tongue, and later presented these stories in a video, and in a booklet. The project “Atom cities” (2005), consisting of a two-volume book and films, documents the “invisible” part of Estonia: the forgotten Sillamäe and Paldiski, cities that had a strategic economic and military significance during the Soviet period. Montesquiou has documented how holidays that originated from the Soviet era are celebrated in the 21st century – compared to the more common method of using objects and archival photographs, hers is a remarkably refreshing approach. She shows the cities, which during the Cold War enjoyed many privileges, in a new light; offering her audience a look into the fears of the inhabitants of these former closed cities and taboos in Estonian society. Montesquiou also highlights the political aspect of nationality in this context without favouring one or the other ideology. One such example would be two videos recorded on September 1st, one in an Estonian school, the other in a Russian school: one shows a quiet and restrained environment, and the other an emotional, open and visually colourful atmosphere. The border city Narva has a special place in Montesquiou's work – it has featured in several of her video works. For example, in “Fabrika” (2009, Art Museum of Estonia) shows Kreenholm as a phenomenon – in its totality and inevitable decline. In collaboration with students from the Estonian Academy of Arts, a three language newspaper the Narva Gazette (2018), was published to give an overview of the historic development of the city and provide observations and illustrations about Narva as it is today in the form of a diary: its streets and people, paragraphs of interviews that were previously published in Montesquiou's book “Na Grane / Narva – Ivangorod” (2009). Life in the border city is also discussed in the video work “Travellers” (2007) that tells the st

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Data from MuIS and the EKM Digital Collection. Full catalogue