Citra Sasmita: Exhibition guide

For her first solo UK exhibition, Indonesian artist Citra Sasmita invites viewers on a symbolic journey, exploring ancestral memory, ritual, and migration.

Sasmita draws from the long histories of displacement and migration across the Indonesian archipelago, and takes inspiration from stories of heaven, earth, and hell – from the Hindu epic Mahabharata to Dante’s Inferno.

Into Eternal Land unfolds across several acts. Panoramic scroll paintings reveal women undergoing transformation and rebirth, while embroidered textiles – made in collaboration with women artisans in west Bali – honour the history of women herbalists. At the exhibition’s close, Sasmita offers a space for meditation around a golden mandala of ground turmeric. Feel welcome to take some time to sit and reflect. An ambient soundscape by Indonesian composer Agha Praditya Yogaswara responds to the commission.

Sasmita’s practice challenges traditional narratives and rejects reductive Dutch colonial conceptions of Bali. She reinvents the motifs and materials of Indonesian Kamasan painting, which dates from the fifteenth century and depicts Hindu epics and Indonesian mythologies. Historically practiced exclusively by men, in these paintings women were either sexualised, reduced to the sole purpose of reproduction, or cast as evil. Reclaiming this tradition, Sasmita’s protagonists are powerful women inhabiting a post-patriarchal world. 

Into Eternal Land speaks to universal and urgent concerns: connecting with ancestral traditions, grappling with the precarity of the natural world, and proposing the possibility of feminist resistance