Citra Sasmita: Into Eternal Land

The Indonesian artist’s Barbican project plunges visitors into a mesmerising Dante-esque world of flames, blood, snakes and dismembered bodies

Citra Sasmita: Into Eternal Land, installation view, Barbican Curve, London 2025. Photo © Jo Underhill and Barbican.

Barbican Curve, London
30 January – April 2025

by JOE LLOYD

The Barbican Centre’s Curve gallery lends itself to narrative. A near semicircle arcing around the venue’s main hall, it allows for exhibitions that unfurl themselves stage-by-stage, as well as for memorable jolts such as Bedwyr Williams’s talking goat or Claudia Andujar’s climatic film installation. The Indonesian artist Citra Sasmita has got the message. Into Eternal Land is structured like a play, with a prologue, three acts and an epilogue, each building on the next as one passes through this very particular space. The prologue serves to ease us in, while the epilogue offers a place to meditate on the action that has come before – quite literally, with mats laid out so visitors can kneel in front of this final artwork. There is also a soundtrack, an ambient composition by fellow Indonesian Agha Praditya Yogaswara that helps to instil a sacred tranquility to an otherwise fiery display.

Citra Sasmita: Into Eternal Land, installation view, Barbican Curve, London 2025. Photo © Jo Underhill and Barbican.

Sasmita works in the traditional Indonesian painting style of kamasan. It originated in the 15th century in the Balinese village of the same name, although it draws on an older tradition of shadow-puppet painting from Java. Largely painted using ochre stone pigments, kamasan depicts a broad range of religious and mythological matters from Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as fables, family sagas and calendars. Many were painted on cloth canvases and hung in temples or palaces, akin to European tapestries. This has meant that many have been lost, both because of the climate and through insects attracted to the rice paste used to prime the fabric.

Historically, kamasan was practised only by men, although this has changed in recent decades, and they have generally been created with a male perspective. “In these paintings,” claims the Barbican, “women were either sexualised, reduced to the sole purpose of reproduction, or cast as evil.” Sasmita aims to overturn this. In addition to painting kamasan herself, she has also collaborated with female Balinese artisans. For this exhibition, her subject matter is a series of mystical transformations of the female body. As well as removing male artists and craftsmen, Sasmita has removed male forms from her visual world, creating an entirely female universe.

Citra Sasmita: Into Eternal Land, installation view, Barbican Curve, London 2025. Photo © Jo Underhill and Barbican.

But more on that shortly. The exhibition’s prologue gives little hint of what is to follow. Sasmita has hung five cow hides from the ceiling. They rest on antique wooden pillars, with elaborately carved and painted heads. They look like divine arrows, thrown by a titan. Sasmita has threaded these hides with rows of red and green beads, which run across them like mountains on a map, or caterpillars across a boulder. They are arranged with no obvious rhyme or reason, but encourage you to look for one. Many of the rows feature larger, pearl-sized beads that glimmer and glow. Coin-like tokens hang off the skins’ sides. It feels like an offering, gifted in thanks for the torrent of inspiration that follows.

Citra Sasmita: Into Eternal Land (detail), installation view, Barbican Curve, London 2025. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

As we turn into the first act of Into Eternal Land, all hell breaks loose. Sasmita has painted four scrolls in vivid kamasan style, with thick outlines and a limited palette centred around red and brown, perhaps in reference to the ochre stones used in traditional works. Her subject matter is a Boschian bacchanalia of inscrutable activities, all carried out by slim nude women with flowing black hair, many surrounded by fire.

Citra Sasmita: Into Eternal Land, installation view, Barbican Curve, London 2025. Photo © Jo Underhill and Barbican.

There are headless women grabbing their own heads, while ensconced in feather-like flames. There is a woman holding two burning swords, with a fire covering up her crotch. Another blazing figure kneels and grasps six more heads by the hair, while further faces sprout from her own locks. From here on, the scenes become more and more esoteric, like alchemical drawings. For instance, one headless female form stands in a bloody pool while ichor leaks out of its breasts, arms and neck stump. It balances on a head that has been blasted open by sprouting vegetation, including a lotus for modesty.

Citra Sasmita: Into Eternal Land (detail), installation view, Barbican Curve, London 2025. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

This tone remains throughout the work, and the exhibition, but there are some shifts.  As we move along the scrolls, more colours begin to creep in: there are blue pools of water and green leaves. Botanical features start to occur, often growing from bodies. There are birds with women’s faces and a whole variety of snakes. One is worn like a belt. Others bite their own tails and form the circular boundaries of ponds. It is not apparent to me what is occurring scene to scene. But the entirety suggests a cycle of renewal, bodies feeding and being fed by the natural world. The boundaries between earthly and spiritual are blurred. Angelic beings pour down wisdom. The water and blood that flows out of their bodies feel like gifts from heaven.

Citra Sasmita: Into Eternal Land, installation view, Barbican Curve, London 2025. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

The second and third acts continue Sasmita’s visual language, but apply them to new materials and forms. First, we have two slim vertical scrolls, each surrounded by a ring of braided strips of artificial hair and topped with wooden temple masks. Look behind, and the scrolls are revealed to be python skin, an appropriately gory choice for the subject matter. Artefacts of humanity and animal life are entwined together, part of the same story. Act three, perhaps the most beautiful works on display, are embroidered canvases. Compared with the paintings they demonstrate particularly strident colours: one centres on two snakes surrounded by rainbow-coloured flames or feathers, and a tree sprouting yellow and lilac flowers.

Citra Sasmita: Into Eternal Land (detail), installation view, Barbican Curve, London 2025. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

The epilogue places scenes from Sasmita’s mythos in another column, this one surrounded by golden ribbons. It dangles above a circle of turmeric, into which is inscribed a prayer to “Mother Earth, Mother of universe … the almighty creator of all that is seen and the unseen above the world”. It is almost startling to see a message of such apparent earnestness in these concrete halls. But then it ends on an unsentimental note: “Between giving and stealing lives, there aren’t many choices.” Sasmita’s eternal land is no easy paradise.