Over the next few days, we will be introducing each of the three artists who make up the Baik Artist Residency. For the entire month of October, each artist will be working in the Van Every gallery creating works for their combined exhibition, which will be on view from October 29th until December 11th.
Today, we are spotlighting Sri Lankan artist and archaeologist Jagath Weerasinghe. Born in Sri Lanka, he studied painting and the conservation of wall and rock paintings before moving to the United States to pursue his MFA at American University in DC. He is currently the director of the Postgraduate Institute of Archaeology at the University of Kelaniya in Sri Lanka and is also the cofounder of the Theertha International Artists’ Collective based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. International exhibitions from the United States to the United Kingdom, Australia, India, the Netherlands, Germany, and Japan have featured Weerasinghe’s work.
Weerasinghe’s work is both an aesthetic experience and a social critique of the violence and inhumanity experienced by Sri Lankans during the country’s civil war of the late 20th century. It is this combination of personal experience and social awareness that makes his work so impactful and radical. In Sri Lanka, Weerasinghe is part of the dominant cultural group of the Singhalese, which was the force executing the genocide against the minority Tamils during the civil war being fought during his early years. However, the artist was abducted and tortured by Sri Lankan government agents in during the 1970s, which gave him direct personal experience of the inhumanity and brutality the regime of his country was sponsoring.
Because of these visceral encounters with inhumanity, cruelty, and genocide, Weerasinghe still draws on these themes in his current work. Though he works in multiple media including painting and drawing, there is a consistency with his use of gestural and expressionist marks in order to express this type of physical violence at the hands of others. Through his body of work, he hopes to create an aesthetic framework that sparks conversation and change against past, present, and future violence. In this way, he is not just an artist, but a social activist. His work is the vehicle through which he fights power imbalance and destructive discourse, in search of peace.
Here in the Van Every/Smith Gallery, Weerasinghe is specifically reflecting on the theme of geopolitical borders and cultural identity, along with his two fellow artist residents, Yong Soon Min and Tintin Wulia. However, the core themes listed above never leave his work. On his current residency, Weerasinghe notes his personal understanding of borders, and how it relates to individual identity:
“The work or the series of works that I try to do here during my residency is about how borders, taken the concept in its widest sense, make the idea of the self to disintegrate, to fragment and to frustrate. But as we know the ‘self’ doesn’t really disintegrate or fragments as such. Said in other words, what I try to capture is the tyranny of the frustrating processes that borders engender.”
Be sure to attend Weerasinghe’s lecture titled “Conserving Buddhist stupas and religious nationalism in Sri Lanka” on October 16th at 4:30 pm in the VAC. He will discuss his work in the context of his religion, Buddhism, and the violence his country experienced due to cultural tensions. Furthermore, come watch Weerasinghe work in his open studio for the rest of the month, where you can experience his process working towards the final product that will be seen in the exhibition. For more information on Weerasinghe’s life and work, visit http://www.saskiafernandogallery.com/jagath-weerasinghe/ and http://www.artsome.co/Jagath_Weerasinghe.
