How does Aino and Alvar Aalto’s vision of healing architecture resonate today, now that Paimio Sanatorium is no longer a hospital? Other Actors video installation at the heart of the Aalto Design exhibition. The installation starts at the exhibition space every hour on the hour.
Ilona Sagar: Other Actors
Other Actors (2025) is a three-channel video installation by London-based artist Ilona Sagar. It explores
the links between bodies and buildings, health and architecture, through the lens of Paimio
Sanatorium. 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. Sagar worked in close collaboration with those who worked at the sanatorium, including the former medical and maintenance staff, workers at the furniture manufacturer Artek, and surviving architects of the Aaltos’ design team.
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.
Notions of care and maintenance are central to the film. 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
pla[orm those who would normally be hidden behind its visual façades.
About Ilona Sagarin
Ilona Sagar, lives and works in London. Using a diverse range of media spanning moving-image,
text, performance and assemblage, she has formed a body of work which responds to the social
and historic context found in the public and private spaces we inhabit. 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.
Sagar is a current resident artist at Somerset House Studios and is a recipient of the Stanley Picker
Fellowship in Design and Fine Art. Forthcoming solo commission with Kings College London in
partnership with the Science Gallery (2027). Recent exhibitions include Other Actors (Stanley
Picker Gallery in partnership with the Aalto Foundation, 2025), Triennale Milano 24th
International Exhibition (2025), and The Radio Ballads (Serpentine Gallery, 2022), where she
presented a new commission alongside Sonia Boyce, Helen Cammock and Rory Pilgrim. Other
notable projects include Create, Capture, Organise, Pluralise (Somerset House, Gallery 31, 2021),
Deep Structure (S1 ArtSpace, Sheffield, 2019), Living with Buildings (Wellcome Collection, 2018–
19), Correspondence O (South London Gallery, 2018), and HereAfter (SPACE Art+Tech, 2017). In
2018 she was awarded the Research in Film Award at BAFTA HQ. Her work has been shown at Art
Rotterdam, The Hayward Gallery, CCA Glasgow, GOMA, Glasgow International, Centre National
d’art Contemporain and The Barbican Gallery, and other international platforms.
Ilona Sagar is a lecturer at Goldsmiths University of London in the Department of Art.