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. Illusion and material [dis]honesty set the stage for works which seek to seduce, alluding to something familiar yet other.

Sagar is a recipient of the Stanley Picker Arts Fellowship. She was artist in residence for the Saastamoinen Foundation Helsinki for 2022. Forthcoming commissions include Alvar Aalto Foundation (2025), Triennale Milano 24th International Exhibition (2025), solo commission with Seizure researchers at The University of Eastern Finland in partnership with Science Gallery London (2027).

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 Research in Film Award at BAFTA HQ. Recent projects include Create, Capture, Organise, Pluralise, Somerset House, Gallery 31, London (2021); Deep Structure (2019), S1 ArtSpace, Sheffield; Living with Buildings, Wellcome Collection, London (2018/2019); Self Service publication and event series, CCA and GOMA, Glasgow International (2018); Correspondence O, solo exhibition at South London Gallery, London (2018); GLORIA, Yinka Shonibare Guest Projects, 10-year anniversary, London (2018); HereAfter, SPACE Art+Tech, The White Building, London (2017).