Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, July 3, 2025 : Citra Sasmita, a Balinese Indonesian artist (#2321)

Thursday, July 3, 2025

Artist of the Day, July 3, 2025 : Citra Sasmita, a Balinese Indonesian artist (#2321)

Citra Sasmita (1990) is an Indonesian artist. A self-taught artist, she started off as an illustrator for the Bali Post, before expanding into painting, sculpture ad installation. She is best known for her use of Kamasan, a painting technique from eastern Bali that is traditionally used to narrate Hindu epics. Her work has been exhibited in Europe and the USA, among them a solo show at the Barbican Centre in London in 2025.

A critical and transformative relationship with her Balinese heritage shapes Citra Sasmita’s artistic practice. Born and based on the island of Bali, Sasmita has a keen interest in the island’s cultural history: its colonial experience, its place in the popular exoticism of the tropical, and how its art scene has always been relegated to either archaeology, anthropology, or tourism. These are forms of inheritance that Sasmita critiques or transforms in a practice that extends from painting to installation, reconciling the canon of Javanese and Balinese cosmology with the feminist work of making women and their voices present.

‘Timur Merah’ is an ever-expanding series that Sasmita has been developing since 2019. It embodies the artist’s interest in how forms of inheritance can be actively harnessed to cultivate the potential of Balinese artistic practices and culture in mediating contemporary discourses. The works draw from the heteropatriarchal iconography of Kamasan scroll painting, which emerged in the 15th century in the Balinese village of the same name, and depict stories of heroic and noble men.

The first iteration of Timur Merah was presented at the Biennale Jogja in 2019. Titled Embrace of My Motherland (2019), the commissioned work comprised five vertical scroll paintings, a floor installation of text written with turmeric, and spice bags strewn across the room made from found Kamasan textiles that Sasmita sourced from tourist art stalls.

Sasmita has been learning from Kamasan painter and priestess for the last 6 years. She sources her canvases – which are handmade and reinforced with rice-flour glue, hand-stretched using seashells, and dried under the sun – from the same elder in Bali; the only surviving artisan that remembers the traditional way.

‘Kamasan painting is not only about the story of the king. It is also about cosmology’, Sasmita points out. ‘There are strategies embedded into the pieces of information derived from Kamasan paintings. It is also a calendar and contains prophecies and thus can also be used as a guide to catastrophes and the changing world. Using Kamasan paintings, we can read natural phenomena, like earthquakes, which can tell us something about current political situations. Everything painted in a Kamasan painting is actually a coding of a situation and a prophecy, so that’s what I learned and became conscious of.’

For its most recent iteration at the Bienal de São Paulo, Beyond the Realm of the Senses (2023), Sasmita added a sculptural element to her hanging scrolls. They were presented with a gold-painted replica of a figurehead found in the Kertha Gosa museum in Bali.

Through its many iterations, ‘Timur Merah’ has become a way for Sasmita to place herself – a traditional Balinese woman who creates contemporary art – in a longstanding tradition of artistic feminist critique and renewal. Talking about the project’s future, she imagines a tree growing. ‘I planted the seed from the first “Timur Merah” and then it started to grow. Its roots were the story of hell,’ she explains. ‘I don’t know if in the future this tree will grow more but I will continue to make them.’ Charged by a discerning relationship with the complexity of cultural inheritance, Sasmita’s paintings are an exercise in continually seeing oneself in this changing world.

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