Tanoa Tasraku Morale Patch

“They call these baubles. Well, it is with baubles that men are led!” This perhaps apocryphal quote from Napoleon Bonaparte about the newly created Legion of Honor, the most prestigious French national order of merit, would be a fitting epigraph for Tanoa Sasraku’s precise and powerful “Morale Patch” show at the ICA in London. In it Sasraku reflects on the significance of objects whose end is no other than the conveyance of power. The show’s evocative title refers to insignia patches worn by soldiers, initially during World War II, as a fraternal sign of belonging to their squadron.

The show, comprising two installations and a series of works on paper, is compact, eloquent and elegant. Throughout, mundane tokens associated with power are recontextualized and placed in novel formations that ignite the viewer’s attention. With economy, Sasraku invites us to reflect on symbolic tchotchkes, and through them, the meaning of neo-imperial and extractivist conquests.

Greeting visitors is Watchlist (2025), commissioned for the occasion. The largest work in the show, occupying an entire room, it presents 32 transparent acrylic objects, each encasing a small amount of crude oil, that rest on beige, white, blue and dark jewelry velvet trays arranged in a chessboard pattern. Each trinket commemorates the first extraction of oil wells from the four corners of the world. The prismatic quality of the objects, made of clear PVC, and the color variations of the crude oil they contain, create an alluring visual experience. Sasraku bought them, cheaply, on eBay when she was looking to buy crude oil as part of her initial investigations into this project. Upon close inspection one can read what they commemorate: a company name or logo, a location and sometimes a date. The mind wanders from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Borneo, from the North Sea to the Gulf of Mexico; the color of the squares where they are positioned symbolizes where these wells were dug: sand or snow desert, sea or land.

The semiotics of the objects that Sasraku uses throughout the show evoke the bureaucracy of power and its conquests. The acrylic mementos — ‘Deal Toys’ or ‘Tombstones’ in corporate slang — have been typically produced in male-dominated enterprises (the corporation, the military). The show oozes organizational energy with its neatly arranged geometries and patterns. Sasraku’s play on minimalist aesthetics channels a world devoid of human emotion, of cold and precise calculations fueling ‘objective’ pursuits.

At the tail-end of the show are Shell (I) and Shell (II), a two-part installation made of custom-made acrylic paperweights, displayed on wool-lined dark wood tables. Through the precise and sparse arrangement, the room acquires a meditative quality. The mood is darker too. Each series of paperweights is screen printed; the first with St Andrew’s Cross and the second with the Stars and Stripes. They contain iron gall ink, which was the standard ink used in Europe until the nineteenth century. The ink references historical bureaucracy, but also, due to its color, oil exploration in the North Sea and in the American desert. Chillingly, the paperweights with the American flag are — unlike those with the Scottish flag — neatly arranged in two rows and imprinted with ‘head’ and ‘foot’ on each short side, an unmistakable allusion to the flag-enwrapped caskets of the service men and women who gave their lives to their country. The military is evoked here as an imperialistic tool in the thirst for oil.

While their presence is not otherwise marked, it is abundantly clear that the show is also about the individuals who are collectively at the service of these endeavors. Yet, their stories and imprint are almost completely erased. There are seven works on paper in the show: Subdued Morale Patch (2025), a series of six works, and the larger and poignantly titled Allomother (2025). For these, Sasraku uses stacks of blank newsprint paper that are then printed by exposure to UV light and soaked in water. The stacked newsprints are held together by neatly aligned paper clips of different colors, their pattern mimicking that of the military service ribbon of an American military campaign. With each work Sasraku chose to represent a war linked with access to oil resources, referenced in the work’s subtitles: War on Terror, Medal of Honor, Cold War, Desert Shield, Prisoner of War and Enduring Freedom.

Allomother adopts the same process. Sasraku enlists her UV-based printing process (she used a sunbed) on newsprint to represent the Star-Spangled Banner flag. In the work only the ghostly remains of the flag are apparent: thirteen whitewashed bands representing the original colonies and the old glory blue and red colors of the paper clips. Under the prolonged effect of elements, the bleached and soaked printed matter becomes nearly invisible, and left are only the traces of nature’s elements and time.

Sasraku evokes masterfully throughout the show the battle between Homo faber and Nature, the confrontation of their respective destructive power. Her practice, which invites an interaction between the digital, the precision-made objects of our time, and the deep time of earthly materials and nature’s elements, embodies this confrontation. With Subdued Morale Patch it is as if Sasraku confronts the fragility — one is tempted to say the futility — of these human ambitions by comparison to ecological and astronomical forces. We know who wins this one in the end.