The ICA London has opened Morale Patch, an exhibition of new work by Tanoa Sasraku, through works on paper, found objects, and sculpture, Sasraku examines the seductive and destructive power of oil – its ties to war and national identity – through a meditation on emblems and mementos.
Morale Patch expands the artist’s material and process-led practice, as Sasraku turns her attention to oil: its materiality, fetishisation, and its role in geopolitics, nationalism, and the economy. As attuned to natural processes and conditions as she is to the nuanced historical contexts of her subjects, Sasraku’s work across sculpture, printmaking, and installation, remains porous to the circumstances of its display. Her works on paper will gradually fade over time, while the national and military symbols they depict shift in meaning depending on audience perception and the volatility of geopolitical context. Sasraku’s interest lies in how complex events, individual and national glory, and militaristic rationale can be pinned to everyday symbols and souvenirs, and how materials themselves carry narrative and emotional weight.
For this new commission, Sasraku collected a series of acrylic paperweights produced by oil companies, each encasing a small amount of crude oil sourced from extraction sites around the globe. In the exhibition, these corporate souvenirs will be repurposed into a monumental new installation staged on a giant tiled display in the ICA’s lower gallery. The strange and highly designed objects boast slogans of success and depict their origin landscapes, from the snowy oil fields of Siberia and Alaska to the deserts of Texas and Saudi Arabia and the waters of the Scottish North Sea. Taken from the executive desks and domestic mantels for which they were intended, Sasraku reconfigured them within a conceptual chess game offering a meditation on extraction, pride, and empire.
In the rear gallery, another series of paperweights continue Sasraku’s enquiry into the intersection of oil and nationalism. Two sets of newly fabricated acrylic sculptures, approximately the size of an Action Man box, resemble miniature military coffins. Each set references a site of war and/or oil extraction: one topped with a screen-printed Scottish flag placed over a North Sea landscape; another draped with an American flag laid across a desert terrain.
The exhibition also includes a new series of works on paper, examining military and national emblems, symbols which distil complex and often devastating histories into designs that can be worn and celebrated as individual achievement. Service ribbons such as the Kuwait Liberation Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, and the Prisoner of War Medal, among others, are rendered in muted, UV-printed patterns on thick stacks of newsprint which warp and ripple like fabric from the artist’s experimental printing process. Sasraku relegates the bold colours represented in these ribbons to the outer edges of the paper, using brightly coloured binder clips to mark their symbolic hues. The centre of the page is left pale, drained. These materials of newsprint, binder clips and paperweights, evocative of administrative bureaucracy, speak to the faded ideals and the aesthetics of power.
The largest of these works at three metres wide, Allomother, will address the American flag, which Sasraku approaches from the perspective of a British artist raised on American pop culture, and for whom the flag once embodied fantasy and aspiration. In Allomother, the iconic stripes of the flag have been burned into the paper using UV light, creating an image that emerges from the natural tone of the newsprint itself. The image, like the material used to make it, is unstable and will fade over the course of the exhibition, contradicting the American flag as a symbol that has seemingly indefatigable potency, and acknowledging its shifting meanings as American national identity evolves amid an unsettled geopolitical landscape.
I was first invited to produce a solo exhibition for the ICA in the Summer of 2023. The ideas for this new body of work have been in my back pocket over the past two years; made, broken down and reformed, as I left art school, left England and began to understand the kind of artist I want to be. The curatorial team at the ICA have made me feel believed in, through a deep, enthusiastic engagement with my ideas and my shift from the materials and processes I was previously known for. This has allowed me to take the risks that I needed to at this juncture in my career and I feel very proud of the work that has emerged during this time.
Tanoa Sasraku
Tanoa Sasraku: Morale Patch 7th October 2025 – 11th January 2026 ICA London
A publication will accompany the exhibition and feature a conversation between Tanoa Sasraku and Fiona Banner, as well as texts by Susan Schuppli, Chiorstaidh Black, Pip Laurenson and Libby Ireland, among others.
