"My time at Xenia was truly magical. I watched the seasons shift as spring began to bloom, took long walks, encountered wildlife daily, and connected with other artists while learning about their practices. I finally had the space to dive into long-awaited reading, finish editing a video, and continue work on a casting project.

Before arriving at Xenia, I had taken imprints of a seam between two concrete blocks outside my studio—an unintentional detail that caught my attention. I was intrigued by the idea of transforming this technical flaw into a permanent, intentional object. At Xenia, I set up a small outdoor sculpture workshop where I created silicone molds from those imprints. I then began casting them using a mixture of marble dust and soil in varying shades, collected from the Xenia grounds.

Coincidentally, my stay aligned with the time of year when tree surgery takes place on the property. Using frottage and copy paper, I captured the textures of the freshly cut tree surfaces—preserving traces of the landscape.

I’m deeply grateful to Bianca and the entire Xenia team for their warmth and generosity, and for offering me this precious opportunity to immerse myself in a few dedicated weeks of creative focus."

Born

1990, 

Israel

About

Ilona Balaga is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in London. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (2023), and a BAFA from Chelsea College of Arts, UAL (2016).

Ilona's practice navigates the tension between the fleeting and the enduring, the organised and the spontaneous. Working across sculpture, installation, video, performance, and collage, Ilona is drawn to spaces which hold a restless energy—where she explores how moments of flux and transformation contrast with more permanent systems. Her work engages with themes of potential, destruction, and renewal in both human and non-human contexts.

Through processes of cutting, adding, erasing, collecting, joining, re-editing, and re-fabricating, she constructs a visual language that treats materials as vessels of activity and carriers of memory. Weaving her materials into new syntaxes, Ilona challenges notions of power, ownership, and history, opening up alternative possibilities beyond the familiar. This reconfiguration becomes a way to investigate how language and meaning are constructed, while also questioning the boundaries between life and art.

Ilona is the recipient of Artis Residency Grant (2025), The Gilbert Bayes Scholarship Award (2023) and the Yehoshua Rabinovich Foundation Grant (2020).  Solo presentations include Bodies in Friction, the Lab Program, Mexico City (2025), Conventional Signs, Bar-David Museum, Kibbutz Baram (2021), Eye of the Storm, Balcont, Tel-Aviv (2019). She has exhibited her work in various group exhibitions including Staffordshire St. Gallery, London (2023), Scoppio Terzo, Terni, Italy (2022), The Wrong Biennale 5th Edition, online (2021), OnCurating Project Space, Zurich (2021) and Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa, Israel (2020, 2018).

About

Ilona Balaga is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in London. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (2023), and a BAFA from Chelsea College of Arts, UAL (2016).

Ilona's practice navigates the tension between the fleeting and the enduring, the organised and the spontaneous. Working across sculpture, installation, video, performance, and collage, Ilona is drawn to spaces which hold a restless energy—where she explores how moments of flux and transformation contrast with more permanent systems. Her work engages with themes of potential, destruction, and renewal in both human and non-human contexts.

Through processes of cutting, adding, erasing, collecting, joining, re-editing, and re-fabricating, she constructs a visual language that treats materials as vessels of activity and carriers of memory. Weaving her materials into new syntaxes, Ilona challenges notions of power, ownership, and history, opening up alternative possibilities beyond the familiar. This reconfiguration becomes a way to investigate how language and meaning are constructed, while also questioning the boundaries between life and art.

Ilona is the recipient of Artis Residency Grant (2025), The Gilbert Bayes Scholarship Award (2023) and the Yehoshua Rabinovich Foundation Grant (2020).  Solo presentations include Bodies in Friction, the Lab Program, Mexico City (2025), Conventional Signs, Bar-David Museum, Kibbutz Baram (2021), Eye of the Storm, Balcont, Tel-Aviv (2019). She has exhibited her work in various group exhibitions including Staffordshire St. Gallery, London (2023), Scoppio Terzo, Terni, Italy (2022), The Wrong Biennale 5th Edition, online (2021), OnCurating Project Space, Zurich (2021) and Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa, Israel (2020, 2018).