Ilona Sagar: Soft Addictions | Gallery 31: Create, Capture, Organise, Pluralise

Somerset House Studios

As part of Ilona Sagar's Soft Addictions works for Gallery 31's third season Create, Capture, Organise, Pluralise, visitors are encouraged to listen to Sagar's looped sound work within the gallery space as an accompaniment to her print and text pieces.
Soft Addictions is a generative series of works that analyze the interface between people and computers and the science of responsive design through sound, digital imagery, performance and text. Using gesture and inference the work abstracts the alternating lines between function and dysfunction as a bodily state, playing with the paradigms of power between technology and the body. Voice and sound acts as both a dislocation and a connecting element within the series, working with the scales of speech, from the bureaucratic and instructional to the emotionally intimate and physical. Device culture has now made the human body evermore remote and co-dependent on technology. Pioneering advances in user-driven technologies threaten to shift our social interactions from one of collective interests to networks of individual desires. Ergonomic syntax, both scientific and fleshy, fuels Soft Addictions with its idiosyncratic logic and vivid output.

Mix: Doug Haywood
Male voice: Shaun French
Female voice: Penelope McGhie
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Curated by Stella Sideli and featuring work by Josiane M.H. Pozi, Majed Aslam, Ilona Sagar and Col Self with Farvash and vvxxii (Sp0re), Create, Capture, Organise, Pluralise explores the notion of the body as an archive; as a record of collective stories, experiences, and memories. The exhibition runs 1 Jul - 31 Oct 2021.
Gallery 31 is a permanent exhibition space dedicated to profiling the Somerset House Studios community and work developed through our residencies. With a rolling programme and a different theme each season, Gallery 31 presents a curated selection of new commissions alongside existing and in-progress works.