for acquiring lungs and walking on dry land
ilona sagar

To coincide with Art Licks Weekend 2016, DKUK Salon presented For Acquiring Lungs and Walking on Dry Land by Ilona Sagar, which included an audio work produced in partnership with The Ballad of Peckham Rye.

The installation incorporated archive footage shot at the Peckham Pioneer Centre in the 1930s, courtesy of the Wellcome Trust and formed part of a new body of work looking at the history and social significance of the Peckham Experiment, a holistic model of healthcare, which aimed to cultivate community wellbeing from 1926-50. It uses the Pioneer Centre as a lens through which to examine ideas of health, welfare and wellness, exploring interactions between collective understandings of common good and individual wellbeing. The installation also incorporated Hesitant desire shall flourish in a soil not too strong, a series of audio walks that include invited speakers and address the changing intellectual and political landscape of public health.

Ilona Sagar received her BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College (2008) and her MFA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art (2012). Using a diverse range of media spanning performance, film 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.

Robert Dingle co-founded The Ballad of Peckham Rye in 2013, an ongoing curatorial project commissioning artists in Peckham. TBOPR are working with Ilona Sagar on the project ‘Correspondence O’ at the South London Gallery in 2017 funded by the Wellcome Trust.