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.
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; Whorrall-Campbell, Grace; Spencer-Davidson, Dylan; Rigole, Jasper and Bergstrom-Katz, Sasha. 2024. 'Psy-disciplines on Film: Research, Reenactment and Documentation. Max Planck Institute'. In: Psy-disciplines on Film: Research, Reenactment and Documentation. Berlin, Germany 11 July 2024.
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.
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
Sagar, Ilona. 2024. 바이오스코프, 물질의 아나토미: 일로나 사가 Bioscope, Anatomy of the Matter: Ilona Sagar. In: "Seoul International New Media Festival (NeMaf) 2024", Seoul, Korea, Republic of, 1 August 2024.
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.
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.