Extract from Who Stole the Sky curatorial text by Heather Jones 

The Kunsthall’s main gallery is filled with Kamasan scroll paintings, a tradition historically dominated by heroic patriarchal narratives. Sasmita radically reclaims this form by placing women at the centre of each cosmology. Her figures are often pregnant, on fire, split open, or bleeding; images that insist on the body as a site of creation, destruction, and renewal. Here, nature is not an external resource but a relative, reflected within the human body itself. Drawing on Christian cosmology and Dante’s Divine Comedy, Sasmita reconfigures heaven, hell, and purgatory as internal states located respectively in the heart, mind, and stomach, emphasising self-realisation over transcendence.

Throughout the exhibition, sacred symbols recur: snakes, trees, fire, blood, and female anatomy form a universal pictorial language that speaks across cultures. The sacred world tree appears in The Rites of Creation, resonating with both Balinese cosmology and the Norse Yggdrasil. Another suspended scroll, The Rites of Revelation, draws on the Lamak, ritual hangings that function as stairways between worlds, reinforcing the exhibition’s vertical movement between divine and earthly realms.