Ilona Sagar’s Stanley Picker Fellowship explores the links between bodies and buildings, health and architecture through the lens of Paimio Sanitorium.
Ilona Sagar, work-in-progress photographs, taken on site at Paimio Sanitorium, Finland
Image Description: photograph of a double doorway in red light at the end of a long hallway with several dark open doors.
Ilona Sagar is currently developing a new body of work as part of her Stanley Picker Fellowship that explores the links between bodies and buildings, health and architecture through the lens of Paimio Sanitorium, Finland. Designed by Aino and Alvar Aalto in 1929, the Sanatorium represents a radical shift in the design for health. Conceived as an “instrument for healing”, the Aaltos’ proposed an architecture designed not for the verticality of the healthy body but for the horizontal perspective of the sick. The Sanitorium is at a significant moment in its transition from hospital to a new purpose. As the restoration progresses, Sagar is interested in its status as a building in flux. Notions of care and maintenance are pivotal in this research. As time moves and agendas change, so does what is being maintained, what survives and what is valued.
Ilona Sagar, work-in-progress photographs, taken on site at Paimio Sanitorium, Finland
Image Description: Photograph of a wood circle in the ground surrounded by grass, pine trees and a stone pathway.
This project is informed by academic collaboration with medical researchers at the Tuberculosis Research Group, Imperial College, and Leicester University TB Research Group. It’s easy to historicize tuberculosis as a disease that’s been eradicated, but one-fourth of the world’s population is still affected by it. Maintenance as a topic of inquiry is extended within this work, from the body, clinical treatment and care, to the intimacy of conservation and heritage. The artist has established links with the former maintenance team, patients, medical staff, and surviving architects of the Aaltos’ design team, whose accounts embody real knowledge of the building, speaking intimately to the archive and its importance. The sanitorium holds unseen correspondence between the Aaltos and doctors that Sagar is working with, alongside permission to use the family archives.
Ilona Sagar reflects on the tenets of modernism inherent in public design, critically examining what is activated through her intervention within this discourse. This new work asks us to consider: what do we do with the architectural legacies of modernism that linger in our cultural imaginary? Another central question is: How do we observe such radical social experiments in the production of health and well-being from the locus of the present? The project antagonises such questions, seeking to eschew the icons of modernism beyond a kind of fetishist quotation, and use them instead to platform those who would normally be hidden behind its visual facades.
Ilona Sagar, work-in-progress photographs, taken on site at Paimio Sanitorium, Finland
Image Description: Photograph of a glass covered dust-free light with a green reflective ceiling in background.
Ilona Sagar
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.
