Balinese Artist Citra Sasmita to Show at London’s Barbican

Citra Sasmita b. 1990, Indonesia Follow +

Indonesian artist Citra Sasmita is known for scroll paintings that seek to demystify Balinese art and culture and introduce a decolonial feminist perspective to gender roles. In January, she will open her first exhibition in the U.K. at the Barbican in London.

As part of her commission Into Eternal Land (30 January–20 April 2025), panoramic scroll paintings speaking to ancestral memory, ritual, and migration will appear in the Barbican’s 90-metre-long gallery The Curve.

To create her work, Sasmita has drawn inspiration from many sources, including migration histories across the Indonesian archipelago and the symbolism of heaven, earth, and hell from literature such as the Balinese epic Mahabharata and Dante’s Inferno.

Inside the gallery, paintings of women undergoing transformation and reincarnation will be featured alongside shrine installations, textiles made in collaboration with women artisans in west Bali, and an ambient soundscape by Indonesian composer Agha Praditya Yogaswara.

‘As a Balinese person, I believe in the ability to be embodied in space and time,’ Sasmita said. ‘The Curve has allowed me to present a ritual for the space itself, along with the cosmology and cultural roots that I bring from Bali.’

Born in 1990, Sasmita studied literature and physics, later working as an illustrator for the Bali Post. To develop her current practice, she studied over the past six years under one of the few remaining Kamasan painters.

By reclaiming the male practice of Indonesian Kamasan painting, a technique used to narrate Hindu epics since the 15th century, Sasmita’s work seeks to introduce alternative narratives to inform new outlooks on gender roles and traditional Indonesian art.

In recent years, Sasmita has increasingly exhibited internationally. Her work features in the ongoing Toronto Biennial (5 November 2024–2 April 2025), and was included in the 2024 biennales of Sydney and Diriyah, and the Thailand Biennale in 2023. —[O]

Main image: Citra Sasmita, Timur MerahProject IX: Beyond the Realm of Senses (Allegory of the Archipelago) (2023). Exhibition view: Choreographies of the Impossible, 35th São Paulo Biennale (6 September–10 December 2023). © Levi Fanan/ Fundação Bienal de São Paulo/ Citra Sasmita.