Familiars consists of three sculptures. Cradle comprises eighteen suspended glass globes, each holding a small amount of yellow chlorine gas. In Hypostasis, three prongs containing bromine are bowed slightly and held down by steel wire, as if ready to snap straight and shatter. Substance Sublimation Unit takes the form of a seemingly brittle ladder, each rung housing iodine. Butt studied biochemistry before art. He was particularly interested in the role of fear in scientific discourse and the scapegoating of queer and racialised people at the height of the AIDS crisis. By bringing toxic substances enticingly close, Familiars asks us to focus on the experience of danger from which scapegoating discourses emerge.

In this installation, small hammers of varying lengths tap mirrors at varying intervals and intensities, like woodpeckers. The space is filled with the sound of the hammers and their buzzing motors. We might think of machines as serving particular human needs, but these devices move to their own rhythms. In this way, the work invites us to ponder alternative relationships to machines and technology.

In later iterations of the work, Horn added two funnels of liquid mercury, which vibrated in response to visitors' footsteps. These recalled the movements of those who had originally experienced the work. A toxic substance, the mercury was replaced with foil and water in Tate's version.

This work consists of two glass vitrines housing a bisected cow and calf submerged in formaldehyde – a flammable solution that is harmful if ingested. Hirst has said that his vitrine sculptures emerged 'from a fear of everything in life being so fragile' and from the desire 'to make a sculpture where the fragility was encased.'

Hirst graduated from Goldsmiths a year earlier than Butt. Some, such as the art critic Jean Fisher, noted similarities between Hirst's vitrines and Transmission, which originally included a vitrine containing larvae, similar to Hirst's work A Thousand Years (1990). Butt's brother alleges that Hirst visited Butt's studio at Goldsmiths before realising this work. Previously, Hirst has declined to comment.

This painting displays a black superhero invented by Ofili. The figure wears a brash bodysuit that exposes his chest and torso, and rests one hand confidently on his hip. This caricatured representation is matched by the flecks of glitter spread across the canvas and the balls of dried elephant dung encased in resin. Ofili has described this fictional figure as a wry response to portrayals of black masculinity in blaxploitation films and comic books, most notably the American superhero Luke Cage, upon whom Captain Shit is partly based. Ofili has said: 'My project is not a PC [politically correct] project … I'm trying to make things you can laugh at. It allows you to laugh about issues that are potentially serious.'

This installation replicates a painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) in which an affluent white woman revels on a woodland swing, watched by two men. In Shonibare's version, the woman has darker skin and wears a print closely associated with West Africa. The work highlights the ideals of whiteness at the centre of the original painting, reinserting references to blackness through which these ideals were constituted. The installation also suggests the syncretism of cultural and ethnic identities more broadly: the pattern was appropriated by the Dutch based on Indonesian batik techniques and fabricated in England primarily by South Asian workers before being exported to West Africa.

This print incorporates newspaper material showing road builders in India; women protesting Britain's execution of Irish prisoners during Ireland's War of Independence; and women subjected to the Pass Law in Apartheid South Africa, which restricted the movement of non-white people. The images foreground the global struggles of women against colonial and neo-colonial powers throughout the twentieth century. The process of making these images – which includes coating etching plates with chemicals and crushing them under a printing press – recalls both the violence depicted and women's steadfast resistance to it. The print is part of the 'Riot Series', produced during a period of accentuated social unrest in Britain in the 1980s.

This photograph displays a bodybuilder's muscular back, the white fabric of a bra stretched taut against his skin. The bodybuilder represents an ideal male body, with the bra offering a playful and erotic subversion of this ideal. Of his adolescence, Ajamu has said that 'there were particular unsaid codes … of how black men were supposed to act and behave.' He has described his photographic work as constituting an archive of alternative images of black queer people and cultures and an attempt to disrupt 'limited modes of representations around particular bodies'.