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Exhibition

Citra Sasmita: Into Eternal Land

30 Jan-20 Apr 2025

Barbican Art Gallery
London EC2Y 8DS

Overview

The Indonesian artist transforms The Curve in her first solo UK exhibition. Via painting, installation, embroidery and scent, take a sensory journey exploring ancestral memory, ritual and migration. 
Sasmita’s practice often engages with the Indonesian Kamasan painting technique. Dating from the fifteenth century, and traditionally practiced exclusively by men, Kamasan was used to narrate Hindu epics. Reclaiming this masculine practice, Sasmita is interested in dismantling misconceptions of Balinese culture and confronting its violent colonial past. Challenging gender hierarchies and reinventing mythologies, her protagonists are powerful women who populate a post-patriarchal world. 

Citra Sasmita is a self-taught artist; she studied literature and physics, then worked as a short story illustrator for the Bali Post before she began developing her expanded artistic practice.