Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic As a child, artist Citra Sasmita used to watch her grandmother fastidiously fashion canang sari and daksinā, baskets made with coconut leaves, for use in rituals that are written into the rhythm of daily life in Bali. These devotional artworks, designed to hold offerings, were the beginning of Sasmita’s fascination with her island’s ancient artistic practices, which she now translates into enveloping, eclectic installations, infusing galleries with the scents, sounds, textures and tempo of Balinese life. The ambience is meditative, but her works also bristle with violence and rage, a fierce resistance to colonial and patriarchal history.When we speak, a few days into the new year, Sasmita is preparing for a 10-day silent retreat in the mountains. After a nonstop run of international exhibitions, “for the first time, I feel burnt out. I need to cleanse my mind and get ready for a new start. In Bali we have lots of methods for balancing the mind and body.” When she returns, Sasmita arrives in London to install her first major UK solo exhibition, Into Eternal Land, at the Barbican’s Curve gallery. The 34-year-old is speaking to me from her studio, a traditional Indonesian pavilion rented from a Buddhist priest and priestess in Ubud, a beguiling Balinese town with terraced rice paddies carved into lush hills, and verdant panoramas of sprawling rainforest. At the end of the day, she rolls her artwork up, and the studio becomes a modest bedroom.Sasmita had once planned to become a physics teacher. But, she says, “I had a different hunger — I was searching for an answer to why I was here, a woman in a patriarchal society.” She wanted to explore “the roots of traditional art in Bali, before the Dutch colonial era changed the mindset about art to something that is commercial.” The Dutch colonial administration took control of Bali in 1908, against staunch resistance, and in the 1920s enacted the Baliseering policy. Under the guise of cultural preservation, it turned the island into a “living museum”, promoting an image of Bali as an exotic travel destination. “Since then everything artists made here became a commodity for tourists,” Sasmita says.This interest led her to train with artist and Hindu priestess Mangku Muriati, one of few female artisans practising Kamasan painting, a traditional form of scroll painting that emerged in east Bali in the 15th century. Derived from the Javanese wayang shadow puppet theatre, Kamasan paintings told similar stories, with famous characters from Hindu-Buddhist manuscripts, deities, rulers and nobility, depicted in scenes dense with elaborate, ornate motifs covering every inch of their surface. Kamasan paintings interpreted ancient texts, including the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Javanese Panji tales; dramatic epics often recounting perennial, universal themes; escapades of love and romance, war and death, the journey to the afterlife, heaven, and hell. Made to adorn temples and altars across the island, they were made by men, often working in groups, and were rarely signed by individual artists, upholding the idea of collective values they depicted.Sasmita adopted some of the traditions she learned under Muriati — painting on the distinctive yellow-hued traditional canvases that are made by hand, soaked in rice glue, and stretched and smoothed with shells under the sun. But she steers sharply away from convention in subject matter: gone are the heroic, swaggering male protagonists of these quests. In their place is a cast of dark-haired and naked women and female-hybrid figures, divine and defiant, depicted with wings or their wombs on fire. At times they are brutally transmuted by nature, branches shooting from their torsos or splitting their heads in two. Sasmita’s artworks are emboldened with acrylic paint — brighter than the palettes rendered by pigment ground from ochre stones conventionally employed in Kamasan. “In ancient paintings, women are often marginalised figures, which inspired me to position women as the primary and central characters in the narratives of my artwork,” Sasmita says. She is inspired by real and mythological figures from throughout history to create her personal iconography, from Hindu goddesses to Draupadi, the female protagonist of the Mahabharata, to 19th-century warrior-poet queen Dewa Agung Istri Kanya, and pioneers of feminist art in Indonesia — the sculptor Dolorosa Sinaga, and the late painter I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih.At the Barbican, female figures populate a 32-metre suspended scroll painting, depicting a tale about the “circle of life and the journey to another realm”. A painting on python skin with braided hair — a motif Sasmita is fond of — enshrines divine feminine energy in the gallery, drawing on the Hindu concept of kundalini, “the inner power of the true self”. A further sensory dimension will be added with an ambient electronic sound piece made in collaboration with composer Agha Praditya Yogaswara, played throughout the space.Sasmita will also unveil her more recent collaborations with artisan Jero Mangku Istri Rini. Rini is one of the few remaining practitioners of a lavish and laborious centuries-old cross-stitch technique, thought to have originated in the village of Jembrana, near Bali’s south-west coast. “While searching for embroidery artisans, I encountered numerous challenges because this technique has almost no successors,” she says. “The lack of logistics and the distribution of materials to this village has led to a decline in the development of embroidery.” Her works with Rini are an act of preservation as much as creation.Sasmita sees matrilineal craft practices as paramount in understanding Bali’s history and evolution. “Our senior women artists are not well written in history, but they still believe in art and consider it their way of life. They see their work as a form of hope, as a way to transfer knowledge to future generations. That is very genuine and moved me, and that’s why I want to tell the story of their practice.” There is another foundational female figure in the artist’s own origin story who inspires this new body of work, too — Sasmita’s mother, who died in 2016. “I gave her a happy ending, contrary to her experience in life. My artwork is an ode to her, and a prayer for her journey.”January 30-April 21, barbican.org.ukFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
