Dr Ilona Sagar

Ilona Sagar is an artist and researcher working across moving-image, installation, performance and publication.

Staff details

Dr Ilona Sagar

Position

Lecturer

Department

Art

Email

I.Sagar (@gold.ac.uk)

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

Book Section

  • Ilona Sagar and Silvia Casini: Dialogues 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.
  • The Radio Ballads Sagar, Ilona. 2024. The Radio Ballads. In: Layla Gatens; Elizabeth Graham and Amal Khalaf, eds. Radio Ballads: Songs for Change. London: Serpentine Civic Projects.
  • How We Hold: Rehearsals for Art and Social Change 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

Film/Video

Professional Activity

Show/Exhibition

Thesis

Other