Timur Merah Project VII by Citra Sasmita is a long-term undertaking that traces and rereads histories and narratives from the Balinese archipelago. The project reinterprets inaccessible manuscripts written in Ancient Javanese and Balinese. In the two-channel video work, a performer recites the poem Prelambang Bhasa Wewatkean (The Coded Language of Symbols), written by I Dew Agung Istri Kanya, a Queen of the Klungkung kingdom in Bali in the 19th century. The Queen was a fierce opposer to the Dutch colonizers, and her poem functioned as a memoir, spreading anti-Dutch propaganda beneath the surface of its tantric symbols. Performed against the backdrop of a Balinese temple ruin, Sasmita reanimates the Queen’s legacy of resistance and calls into question Bali’s current role as a tourist destination as its cultural landmarks begin to erode. Sasmita’s paintings also revise the Kamasan painting genre which depict traditional Balinese stories. Sasmita inverts these narratives by offering an anti-patriarchal vision of the past. Adorned with fur, and replacing masculine deities and mythological figures with women as the protagonists, the works are alternative imagined histories.