Ilona Sagar works with a diverse range of media spanning moving-image, text, performance and assemblage, forming research-led works that resonate with the politically charged social and historic infrastructures found in the public and private spaces we inhabit. By instrumentalising historical archives and their institutions, not as an encounter with a safely sealed past, but as something current and unstable that speaks urgently to our present condition, she explores the links between language, surface, technologies and the body through our increasingly mediated encounters in social, political and experiential space. A significant aspect of her practice is the broad cross-disciplinary dialogue generated through collaboration with a range of art and scientific disciplines; including dance, architecture and neurology. Illusion and material [dis]honesty set the stage for works which seek to seduce, alluding to something familiar yet other.
Biography
Ilona Sagar (b 1985), lives and works in London. She received a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College in 2008 and completed an MFA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 2012, and recently compoleted a TECHNE, AHRC research funded MPhil/Phd by practice at the Royal College of Art in London.
In 2018 she won the Research in Film Award at BAFTA HQ and was the Saastamoinen Foundation, Helsinki, artist for 2021. She was commissioned for ‘The Radio Ballads’ Serpentine Gallery, alongside Sonia Boyce, Helen Cammock and Rory Pilgrim (2022). Other recent projects included ‘Deep Structure’(2019) S1 ArtSpace, Sheffield, ‘Living with Buildings’, Wellcome Collection, London (2018/2019); ‘Self Service’ publication and event series, CCA and GOMA, Glasgow as part of Glasgow International (2018); ‘Correspondence O’, solo exhibition at South London Gallery, London (2017/2018); ‘GLORIA’, Yinka Shonibare Guest Projects 10 year anniversary, London (2018); HereAfter group show as part of the SPACE HereAfter residency, The White Building, London (2017); solo project at Pump House Gallery, London, as part of ‘The Ground We Tread’ (2016) and Tenderpixel London (2015 and 2014). She is currently embarking on a new solo commission with Firstsite Gallery, Colchester.
