Join us for the launch of Other Actors, a new three-channel film piece by Stanley Picker Fellow Ilona Sagar, exploring the links between bodies and buildings, health and architecture through the lens of the Paimio Sanatorium in Finland.
Designed by Alvar and Aino Aalto and completed between 1929 and 1933, the sanatorium represents a radical shift in the design for health. Conceived as an “instrument for healing” the Aaltos’ proposed an architecture designed not for the verticality of the healthy body but for the horizontal perspective of the sick. At the time of filming, the sanatorium is at a significant moment in its transition from hospital to a new purpose. As restoration progresses, the film examines its status as a building in flux.
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Biography
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.
Sagar is a current resident artist at Somerset House Studios and is a recipient of the Stanley Picker Fellowship in Design and Fine Art. Forthcoming commissions include the Alvar Aalto Foundation (2025) and solo commission with Kings College London in partnership with the Science Gallery (2027). Recent exhibitions include Triennale Milano 24th International Exhibition May-Nov 2025, ‘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 artist in residence at the Saastamoinen Foundation in Helsinki. In 2018 Ilona Sagar won The AHRC Research in Film Award at BAFTA HQ.
