Citra Sasmita, Timur Merah Project I: Embrace of My Motherland, 2019, commission artwork of Biennale Jogja, ‘Do we live in the same playground?’. Courtesy of the artist and Biennale Jogja 2019.
"Citra Sasmita, the artist reimagining traditional Kamasan painting with powerful female imagery, is participating in the Toronto Biennial of Art ahead of her first solo UK exhibition at the Barbican in 2025.
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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.
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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."
