Ilona Sagar

A solo exhibition of London-based artist Ilona Sagar at VITRINE's Bermondsey Square premises. The exhibition will comprise a new installation in VITRINE’s sixteen meter window space which will include text and sound. For this body of work, Sagar has worked with sound designer Doug Haywood.

Spanning performance, film, sound, installation and assemblage, Ilona Sagar’s multi-faceted practice investigates the social and spatial structures that we negotiate on a daily basis in public spaces such as museums, galleries, churches and theatres, as well as in the virtual realm. Her work responds to the historical and cultural connotations of these domains, exploring the universally recognised codes of conduct that we follow during shared interactions.

Sagar has collaborated with dancers, performers, choreographers, writers and architects, expanding the borders of art practice in order to draw new perspectives on the constraints that a space places on our collective behaviour.

This work explores the relationship between body, surface and displacement through its manifestation in speech and design. Sagar approaches the body as an adaptable tool rather than a fixed form. Speech and gesture combine as an interface to examine our multi-faceted relationship to design syntax, as an instance of technology and flesh.

Sagar’s interest in space, layers and transparency carries through and encompasses the different visual imagery, text and sound overlapping in the exhibition space, creating an elaborate layering of bodies, narrative and surface. These visual, habitual and sonic experiences are in a fluid dialogue with each other, creating a muted depiction of speech, misunderstanding and the mouth as a space of consumption and exchange. There is a collision between internal and external languages in design, cognition and the body. The external syntax clashes with an internal language which is messier, more visceral and emotional.

Through the mediums of sound, text and photographic installation, this new body of work seeks to examine the residue left in the wake of our conflicting relationship to both the virtual and physical body.