Dr Ilona Sagar
Staff details
Ilona Sagar is an artist and researcher working across moving-image, installation, performance and publication.
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.
Academic qualifications
- PhD by Practice, Arts & Humanities, Royal College of Art 2024
Teaching and supervision
Ilona Sagar is a lecturer on the Fine Art & History of Art B.A. course, she is a co-convenor of Goldsmiths Contemporary Art Talks public program
Research interests
Through moving-image, installation, performance, and publication, Ilona Sagar's research explores the contemporary deadlock between individual and collective notions of wellbeing implicit within the spatio-social apparatus of health, and the role that histories of experiments in social- planning and health might play in understanding and rethinking these relationships. 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.
Featured publications
2022:
The Body Blow
Radio Ballads was commissioned by Serpentine Galleries in partnership with New Town Culture
2019:
Deep Structure
S1 ArtSpace, Sheffield
2018:
Correspondence O
South London Gallery and The Wellcome Collection (RIFA winner 2018)
Grants and awards
Publications and research outputs
Artist's Book
Hendry, Kirsty and Sagar, Ilona. 2018. Self-Service.
Book Section
Sagar, Ilona and Casini, Silvia. 2025. Ilona Sagar and Silvia Casini: Dialogues. In: Fiona Johnstone and Ilona Sagar, eds. Confabulations: Art Practice, Art History, Critical Medical Humanities. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Sagar, Ilona. 2024. The Radio Ballads. In: Amal Khalaf; Elizabeth Graham; Layla Gatens and Ilona Sagar, eds. The Radio Ballads.
Sagar, Ilona. 2023. How We Hold: Rehearsals for Art and Social Change. In: Jemma Egan; Layla Gatens; Elizabeth Graham; Amal Khalaf and Alex Thorp, eds. How We Hold: Rehearsals for Art and Social Change. London: Walter Koenig/Serpentine Gallery. ISBN 9783753 305035
Conference or Workshop Item
Sagar, Ilona. 2024. 'Art & the Critical Medical Humanities: Confabulations X Health & Care at the RCA'. In: Art & the Critical Medical Humanities: Confabulations X Health & Care at the RCA. Royal College of Art, United Kingdom 19 - 21 June 2024.
Sagar, Ilona. 2024. 'Artist Talk Ilona Sagar'. In: Wednesday Artist Lectures. University of Reading, Department of Art, United Kingdom 28 February 2024.
Sagar, Ilona. 2024. 'On mediated encounters in social, political and experiential spaces through interdisciplinary arts practice'. In: On mediated encounters in social, political and experiential spaces through interdisciplinary arts practice.. Information Experience Design, Royal College of Art, United Kingdom.
Film/Video
Sagar, Ilona. 2022. The Body Blow.
Sagar, Ilona. 2019. Deep Structure.
Sagar, Ilona. 2018. Correspondence O.
Professional Activity
Sagar, Ilona. 2024. Stanley Picker Fellowship.
Sagar, Ilona. 2018. Research in Film Awards (RIFA) Winner.
Show/Exhibition
Blumer, Stéphane and Borges, Sofia. 2023. CARTAZES. In: "CARTAZES", comıtė, Lisbon, Portugal, 3 - 21 July 2023.
Sagar, Ilona. 2022. The Body Blow. In: "Radio Ballads", Serpentine Galleries, London, United Kingdom, 31 March – 29 May 2022.
Sagar, Ilona. 2021. Create, Capture, Organise, Pluralise. In: "Create, Capture, Organise, Pluralise", Somerset House, London, United Kingdom, 1 July - 31 October 2021.
Thesis
Sagar, Ilona. 2024. Persistent Afterimages: The Living Structure of Bodies, Buildings and Archives. Doctoral thesis, Royal College of Art
Other
Sagar, Ilona. 2021. Giving Bodies Back to Data Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Conferences and talks
2023:
The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities' (CRASSH)
Screening of The Body Blow and discussion hosted by The University of Cambridge (with Dr. Layla Renshaw, Zsuzsanna Ihar and Dr. Paola Filippucci)
2022:
Environmental Dis-ease. Co-productions of Toxic Politics - University of Vienna, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Ilona Sagar artist talk and Screening
2022:
Durham University Confabulations: data devices diagnosis
Biomedical imaging & artists’ practices: Artists Ilona Sagar and Flis Holland in conversation with Samantha Lippett
2022:
Publics curatorial agency - Shape Helsinki Symposium
Paul O’Neill, Carolina Rito, Bassam El Baroni, Ilona Sagar, Joasia Krysa, Dahlia El Broul, Constantinos Miltiadis