ICA, 2025, Softcover, 120 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Edited by Andrea Nitsche-Krupp and Tanoa Sasraku, with Contributions by Tanoa Sasraku, Fiona Banner, Chiorstaidh Black, Pip Laurenson, Libby Ireland, Susan Schuppli, Andrea Nitsche-Krupp and full colour documentation of the ICA exhibition.
Tanoa Sasraku: Morale Patch has been published to accompany the exhibition of the same name held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
The publication is a richly visual and intellectually expansive companion to Sasraku’s ICA solo exhibition (6 October 2025 – 11 January 2026). Blending artist book and discursive platform, it captures a pivotal moment in Sasraku’s evolving practice, which weaves together deep material inquiry, personal narrative, and geopolitical critique. From ephemeral works on paper UV- printed with the patterns of military and national emblems, to the collection of oil-encased corporate mementos, Sasraku’s exploration of oil as both substance and symbol reveals its entanglement in histories of nationalism, militarism, and imperial power.
The book contains essays by writers from varying disciplines who address the multiple parallel and conflicting registers – symbolic, material, political, emotional and cultural – across which Sasraku’s work operates. It features a conversation between Sasraku and artist Fiona Banner, in which they grapple with the cultural metabolisation of war and violence within their practices. Contemporary art conservators Pip Laurenson and Libby Ireland analyse one of Sasraku’s found paperweights through the lens of their profession, treating conservation as an investigatory tool to consider the divergent timescales contained within it, and situating the object within the material history of the petromodern era. The publication benefits from a reprint of an important essay by researcher and artist Susan Schuppli that examines the Deepwater Horizon spill of 2010, which Schuppli prefaces with a new introduction. And Chiorstaidh Black considers the ways in which Sasraku’s work confronts the intricacies of valour and mourning, deliberating on how emblematising and commemoration can work to obscure state-sanctioned violence. Together these texts represent an open-ended engagement with the questions posed by this body of work, rather than an attempt at summary or definitive analysis.
