2021

Ilona Sagar

Ilona Sagar Correspondence O (2017). Digital still, dual-screen installation. Commissioned by South London Gallery, The Wellcome Trust and The Ballad of Peckham Rye.

Ilona Sagar Deep Structure (2019) at S1 Artspace, Sheffield. Installation view. Photography Reuben James Brown.

Ilona Sagar Haptic Skins of a Glass Eye (2016). Digital still. Courtesy the artist. 

Ilona Sagar, lives and works in London. Using a diverse range of media spanning moving-image, text, performance and assemblage, she has formed a body of work which responds to the social and historic context 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.

Ilona Sagar | Website

Biography

Ilona Sagar is a current resident artist at Somerset House Studios and is a recipient of the Stanley Picker Arts Fellowship. Forthcoming commissions include Alvar Aalto Foundation (2024) and solo commission with Seizure researchers at The University of Eastern Finland in partnership with Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital London (2026). Recent exhibitions include ‘The Radio Ballads’ Serpentine Gallery, where she was one of four new commissions with Sonia Boyce, Helen Cammock and Rory Pilgrim (2022). In 2022 she was the Saastamoinen Foundation, Helsinki, artist in residence. In 2018 Ilona Sagar won The AHRC Research in Film Award at BAFTA HQ.