Standard Issue

By Theo Weiss

What fantasies lay the ground for military conquest, and what myths drive it forward? These are the questions that Tanoa Sasraku, nominee for this year’s Turner Prize, reflects on in her new body of work. The seven sculptures in Tropical Ken, at Vardaxoglou in Soho, are constructed from sheets of blank newsprint that have been cut and layered to resemble military flak jackets. These paper fatigues are slightly bulging and frayed at the edges, cinched together by rows of colourful binder clips that create points of tension across their surfaces. Each jacket is subtly patterned with camouflage and heavily faded, as if bleached by an intense sun. The vibrant, pastel-coloured boxes and floor crates that house these weathered fatigues could be fruit or toy packaging, or perhaps weapons crates unloaded from a military aircraft.

"potential rivieras"

The show comes at the end of a summer dominated by ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and the West Bank. For Sasraku, contemporary conflicts such as these share a common feature: they’re justified by a mythic narrative of protection and control, in which hyper-masculine invaders counter apparent threats to defend the sanctity of those back home, casting themselves as civilising settlers in unfamiliar and inhospitable places. The invasion and creation of what Sasraku terms ‘potential rivieras’, conquered terrains where invading forces create new forms of paradise in a peculiar symbiosis of war and leisure, dates back at least as far as the nineteenth century, when Western missionaries established outposts along the beaches and in the interior jungles of West Africa to cultivate their own forms of paradise (and, just as importantly, open trade routes and lay the ground for colonisation). This also happened in Vietnam, where American troops surfed on sandy beaches and carved out baseball fields in the jungle. And it became even more brazen after 9/11, when British and American troops invaded Iraq and broadcast images of soldiers swimming and fishing in the grounds of Saddam Hussein’s conquered palaces. More recently, Donald Trump’s plans to create a modern ‘Riviera’ along Gaza’s decimated coastline demonstrate that the idea of paradise-making remains as vital to the mythology of warfare as ever.

Sasraku’s paper flak jackets reflect these tendencies in a direct but never didactic fashion. Flak jackets are standard-issue pieces of military equipment originally designed as functional protective garments for frontline soldiers, but Sasraku transforms them into ambiguous and contradictory objects. Her sculptures might be read as military trophies or souvenirs of victorious campaigns, with titles such as ‘The Challenger’ and ‘The Interior’. Sasraku has previously used similar coloured binder clips to suggest military service ribbons and martial glory in a series of works titled ‘Subdued Morale Patch’, which featured in a recent show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The camouflage patterns in Tropical Ken gesture to particular episodes in British military history, each designed for different theatres of desert and jungle warfare. One jacket features a distinctive two-tone jagged pattern created for British troops deployed to Iraq during the first Gulf War of 1990-91. Others feature more recognisable patterns used in the ‘War on terror’ in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021. Another, designed in the 1970s for jungle operations, was later used in the Falklands. The triumphant quality of the works is also emphasised by the boxes and crates in which they’re displayed.

"uneasy surfaces"

The exhibition’s title, Tropical Ken, refers to Mattel’s Barbie and Ken dolls, childhood escapism meeting brutal militarism: ‘Tropical Ken,’ who sports Hawaiian-print board shorts and a traditional Hawaiian floral necklace, was released in 1985, while ‘Staff Sergeant Ken’ was released in 1992 during the Desert Storm campaign of the first Gulf War as part of a Stars ‘n Stripes set that included a matching Barbie doll. The frames that house Sasraku’s flak jackets are painted in deliberately kitsch colours that echo popular toy brands such as Lego and Brio. But the jackets themselves are considerably more subtle. Sasraku imprinted the camouflage patterns with UV light before soaking the jackets and edging them with clips, producing pinch points that lend unnervingly taut ripples to the surface of each work. The camouflages contain covert allusions to the haphazardness of conflict. One desert camouflage had to be redesigned at the outbreak of the first Gulf War after the British Army discovered that it had previously sold the original pattern to the Iraqis, prompting a last-minute scramble to develop an alternative. 

What lingers is the sense that Sasraku’s jackets are holding together something ultimately unstable. The colourful clips pinned along the edges of each vest seem to hold the layered sheets in place, reinforcing the idea that the stories told by the victors of gallant warfare constantly have to be reinforced. They also give the sculptures the appearance of bound documents or archival files, perhaps containing stories of battles that were fought and won, but also of others that were lost and potentially forgotten. Together, these uneasy surfaces suggest that despite the rhetoric of conquest, landscapes shape invaders as much as they are shaped by them, and military victory is often more precarious, complicated and incomplete than any official narrative might suggest.

Tropical Ken is at Vardaxoglou 11 September – 31 October 2026