Ilona Sagar lives and works in London. Using media spanning moving image, text, performance, and assemblage, her work responds to the social and historic context of the public and private spaces we inhabit. Through instrumentalising archives and their institutions – not as safely sealed records of our past, but as something current and unstable that speaks urgently to our present condition – Sagar explores links between language, surface, technologies, and the body through our increasingly mediated encounters in social, political and experiential space. Central to her practice is broad dialogue and collaboration with artistic and scientific disciplines including dance, architecture and neurology.

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Ilona Sagar is a current resident artist at Somerset House Studios and 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)