Ilona Sagar
Other Actors explores the links between bodies and buildings, health and architecture through the lens of the Paimio Sanatorium in Finland. Designed by Alvar and Aino Aalto and completed between 1929 and 1933, 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.
At the time of filming, the sanatorium is at a significant moment in its transition from hospital to a new purpose. As restoration progresses, the film examines its status as a building in flux. Notions of care and maintenance are pivotal in this project. As time moves and agendas change, so does what is being maintained, what survives and what is valued.
Featuring prominent theorists Beatriz Colomina, Heini Hakosalo, and Peter Stadius, Other Actors asks us to consider what we do with the architectural legacies of modernism that linger in our cultural imaginary, and how we can platform those who would normally be hidden behind its visual facades.
Sagar worked in close collaboration with those who have lived and worked in Paimio Sanatorium, including the former maintenance staff, workers at the furniture manufacturer Artek, and surviving architects of the Aaltos' design team, whose accounts embody real knowledge of the building, speaking intimately to the archive and its importance. Other Actors is informed by collaboration with the Aalto University School of Engineering, the Kalasatama Undocumented Migrants Clinic, as well as the Tuberculosis Research Group at Leicester University and Imperial College London, highlighting an urgent contemporary perspective on a disease often thought to be a relic of the past.
Fit Test is an audio work co-written by Ilona Sagar and Flis Holland. It is to be experienced in the Paimio chair, a seat originally designed to aid breathing in tuberculosis patients. The audio piece weaves together personal and historical narratives, and is structured through the archival cataloguing system used to organise photographic records in the Paimio Sanatorium archives. The work navigates fragmented registers of voice, memory, and medical bureaucracy.
Bio
Ilona Sagar is a London-based artist and filmmaker, and resident of Somerset House Studios. Drawing on archival research and interdisciplinary collaboration, her work explores how civic and social identities are constructed and contested through the infrastructures of health, technology, and the body. Recent projects include Other Actors (Stanley Picker Fellowship, 2025), currently touring to the Architecture and Design Museum Helsinki, Nordic House Reykjavík and Röhsska Museum Gothenburg.
Her work has been presented internationally in venues including the 24th International Exhibition at Triennale Milano, Serpentine Gallery, Barbican Art Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Wellcome Collection, CCA Glasgow, Villa Arson Centre National d'Art Contemporain and Art Rotterdam. In 2027, she will undertake a collaborative research project with neurologists at King's College London and the University of Eastern Finland in partnership with Saastamoinen Foundation. Forthcoming work includes projects with Cement Fields and a solo commission with public programme at Somerset House Studios.
Images on this page: Ilona Sagar, still from Other Actors, 2025
