Ilona Sagar
Cross-disciplinary artist and filmmaker
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. She is the recipient of the Stanley Picker Arts Fellowship (2025) and was artist-in-residence with the Saastamoinen Foundation, Helsinki (2022). Forthcoming Commissions include solo projects with researchers at King’s College London and the University of Eastern Finland in partnership with Science Gallery London (2027).
Recent exhibitions include Other Actors (Stanley Picker Gallery in partnership with the Aalto Foundation, 2025), Triennale Milano 24th International Exhibition (2025), and The Radio Ballads (Serpentine Gallery, 2022), where she presented a new commission alongside Sonia Boyce, Helen Cammock and Rory Pilgrim. Other notable projects include Create, Capture, Organise, Pluralise (Somerset House, Gallery 31, 2021), Deep Structure (S1 ArtSpace, Sheffield, 2019), Living with Buildings (Wellcome Collection, 2018–19), Correspondence O (South London Gallery, 2018), and HereAfter (SPACE Art+Tech, 2017). In 2018 she was awarded the Research in Film Award at BAFTA HQ. Her work has been shown at Art Rotterdam, The Hayward Gallery, CCA Glasgow, GOMA, Glasgow International, Centre National d'art Contemporain and The Barbican Gallery, and other international platforms.