Tropical Hardware

Tropical Hardware is an exhibition of new sculptural and installation work by Tanoa Sasraku. The exhibition takes uniforms and trinkets as carriers of personal and political memory, exploring how they are deployed in the quest for individual and state power. Featuring newly commissioned works on paper, found objects, and sculpture, the artist contends with the role of women in crafting the masculine ideal.

Tanoa’s first solo exhibition in Scotland expands her sculptural practice through a sustained examination of the reconstruction of man: man at war, man in his coffin, and man imagined. Her enlarged, crated sculptures suggest multiple associations: body armour, document pile, paper doll chain, strategic game piece. Working with materials including disassembled combat clothing from tropical theatres, UV-tanned prints, and crude oil, Tanoa subjects each element to a process of transformation, reconstituting them into sculptural forms that speak to the spectral presence of the departed authoritarian.

With a title lifted from a couture collection produced by Tanoa’s father in the 1990s, this body of work echoes the artist’s personal history and persistent drive to remake the paternal figure throughout her practice.

Additional thanks to Vardaxoglou Gallery.