




Citra Sasmita
Further images
If Kamasan Village represents the East of Bali, then Into Eternal Land is Sasmita’s own metaphorical journey to the West. From the Kamasan paintings in Act One that highlight the traditions of Klungkung, she brings us to the West of Bali with the embroideries in Act Three. These embroideries were made in collaboration with artisans from the Jembrana community, who Sasmita has been working closely with for more than a year. A continuation of her larger installation Timur Merah Project XII: Rivers With No End (2023) which she first showed at Diriyah Biennale in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia last year, these newly developed textile works for Barbican reflect the Jembrana artisans’ deft mastery of colours and craft, which is now a dying trade in Bali. Nearly symmetrical in composition, these embroideries honour the history of women herbalists. They also reinforce the fundamental importance of repetition in Balinese rituals and culture, as an accessible means for passing on knowledge to the local community across generations. For Sasmita, her iconography of impassioned figures is a vernacular that she is creating in hopes to translate and transform our understanding of Balinese heritage, colonial history and womanhood, through the manifold ways in which she adapts her language onto Kamasan canvas, ancient fabrics, the many other constellations she has conceived.