Want to know the grotesque truth about the oil industry? Then look at their tacky paperweights

Tanoa Sasraku has been collecting – and creating her own – gaudy paperweights with a drop of crude oil encased within. All you need to know about global power games, the artist explains, is right there

In her bright Glasgow studio, artist Tanoa Sasraku is showing me her collection of paperweights produced by oil companies. “I find them so alluring, almost like perfume bottles or snow globes, but so grotesque,” she explains as we handle the etched and sculpted objects, which each have a precious drop of crude oil at their centre. “They have these shiny, dazzling exteriors, but when you get close you see the death mulch inside. All presentations of power are fragile; they collapse once you get close enough.”

Sasraku’s paperweights form the centrepiece of Morale Patch, her forthcoming solo exhibition at the ICA in London: a poetic interrogation of the role of oil in geopolitics and national identity. Drawn from oil-producing nations around the world, the tacky paperweights embody both the seductive allure of extraction and the pomposity and fragility of its resulting wealth and power. Like an absurd game of Battleships, they are displayed on a grid of velvet-lined jewellery boards forming a map of worldwide oil production – and subsequent conflict. “I was thinking about oil alliances and clashes between nations and this stalemate that has occurred. When you map them out, you get the sense that if one warhead went off, it would all collapse.”