GATHERING: Tanoa Sasraku in conversation with Karlito Miller Espinosa

Join artist Tanoa Sasraku in conversation with artist and scholar Karlito Miller Espinosa, as they discuss Sasraku’s exhibition Tropical Hardware, the artist's first solo exhibition in Scotland.

Commissioned and produced by Glasgow International, Tropical Hardware presents a new body of sculptural and installation work that examines uniforms and trinkets as carriers of personal and political memory. The project extends Sasraku’s ongoing investigation into the reconstruction of masculinity- figures of man at war, in death, and as imagined ideals.

Together, Sasraku and Miller Espinosa will explore the exhibition’s key concerns, from militarisation and image-making to working with found objects, inheritance, authorship, and the reworking of the paternal within contemporary sculptural practice.

Tanoa Sasraku

Tanoa Sasraku’s practice encompasses sculpture, drawing and filmmaking. Her work is rooted in the material and symbolic properties of land via landscapes, pigments, and minerals, and informed by a personal relationship to textiles and pattern making.

Tanoa Sasraku (b. 1995, Plymouth, UK) graduated from Goldsmiths (2018) and the Royal Academy Schools (2024). Sasraku is nominated for the 2026 Turner Prize. Recent solo exhibitions include, ‘Morale Patch’, ICA, London, UK (2026); ‘Man Engine’, Vardaxoglou, London (2023); ‘Tanoa Sasraku’, Vardaxoglou, London (2022); ‘Terratypes’, Spike Island, Bristol (2022); and ‘Liths’, Peer, London, UK (2023).

Karlito Miller Espinosa

Karlito Miller Espinosa is a Costa Rican-American artist who creates paintings, public murals, and sculptural installations informed by the direct relationship between capitalism and the structuring role violence plays in its preservation. His studio practice pays particular attention to the absence, loss, memories, migrations, and transformations motivated by the inherent contradictions embedded within the social, political, and cultural structures of society.

Karlito participated in the 2020 Whitney Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. He earned his MFA from the University of Arizona in 2019 and his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2012. His murals can be found in Ukraine, Russia, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and throughout the United States. His paintings have been exhibited internationally at venues including the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, Art Basel in Miami, El Museo del Barrio in New York, and are part of the collections at the University of Arizona Museum of Art and the Tucson Museum of Art.

He is currently living and working in Scotland where he is a visiting lecturer for the Painting & Printmaking department at the Glasgow School of Art.