Private View: Saturday, 5th of December 2026, 3-6pm
West Palm Beach (Florida, USA)
Across a ten-metre embroidered tapestry, nude female figures appear in poses of performance and ritual, their bodies pouring, flaming, splitting open in blaze of colour and merging with plant life. This is Empire of the Soul, the titular work of Balinese artist Citra Sasmita’s solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde, West Palm Beach, which explores ritual practice as an essential part of contemporary life, offering a way to remain connected to the body, nature and ancestral knowledge. Weaving together religious symbols and mythological narratives, Sasmita invites us to embrace a more fluid understanding of the world.
Sasmita’s practice is rooted in the ancient Balinese belief that visual art is a spiritual discipline through which the artist embodies the energy of the universe. In this process, the artist becomes a mediator, translating natural phenomena and cosmic forces into visual forms that transmit knowledge across generations. Traditionally, rerajahan (sacred drawings) were passed through priestly lineages and created for specific purposes, including protection, purification and the balancing of energy. For Sasmita, such practices are not relics of the past, but a means of understanding and responding to the present moment. Ritual becomes a way of listening to nature, acknowledging its capacity to heal and challenging the systems of exploitation that threaten it. Her highly symbolic imagery invites us to look beyond the visible, and inward: eyes recur throughout her compositions as portals to the soul, connecting physical reality with the unseen and bridging consciousness with the subconscious.
This exhibition continues Sasmita’s explorations into and reimaginings of traditional Indonesian techniques, including classical Balinese Kamasan painting, a tradition dating back to the fifteenth century and historically practised exclusively by men, and tumanggal weaving, a practice originating in Central Java through which cotton is spun into ceremonial and spiritual cloths. Across these mediums, she revisits mythological stories while engaging with contemporary questions of history, decolonisation and feminism. Her reclamation of these traditional techniques and ritual practices also challenges the romanticised image of Bali as the ‘Last Paradise’, a place imagined as untouched by time and suspended in an idealised past. For Sasmita, tradition is not a fixed state, but a living and evolving worldview through which contemporary realities can be understood and reimagined. This perspective is reflected in her depictions of the female body as a site of transformative power.
In Chronicles of Endless Codex 1, a central figure cradles her severed head between her legs as streams of white and red liquid, evoking milk and blood, flow from her breasts to form a pool beneath her. In Chronicles of Endless Codex 3, two female figures bear vaginal-shaped wounds in place of one of their legs, from which intertwining branches emerge. As their titles suggest, the works form part of an imagined, interconnected narrative that centres around the body as inseparable from the natural world. Painted in Kamasan style, their intricate compositions are framed by decorative borders incorporating ceremonial cloth, pearls and beads, lending them the presence of sacred objects or altar pieces. Elsewhere, borders made from hair reference deep genealogies and memories held in the body.
The tumanggal weavings, meanwhile, map her deity-like figures onto the nightsky. Here, the female body, cut from shimmering glass fabric and edged with golden thread and sequins, becomes a constellation, a source of light and guidance in the dark. As throughout the exhibition, the craft aspects of the work also carry a political significance, challenging the historic marginalisation of craft traditions and the hierarchies through which artistic value is ascribed.
Just as Sasmita moves easily between materials, techniques and iconographies, her imagery dissolves the boundaries between the human and the natural, the visible and the unseen, opening up a more expansive and interconnected worldview.
