“ The bleeding heart at the centre of the painting is important to my story, even through it is at odds with its modernist construction” – Jagath Weerasinghe, Sunday Observer, November 22 ,1992.

Born in 1954 to a middle class family, Jagath Weerasinghe grew up in the atmosphere of Colombo suburbia. His initial education in visual arts was acquired within the walls of the Institute of Aesthetic Studies, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka where in 1981 he graduated with a BFA degree. Weerasinghe’s diverse interests allowed him to drift his attention to other related fields of art such as conservation of mural paintings. In 1983, for one year, he spent working as a Trainee Mural Painting Conservator getting foundation knowledge in the field of art conservation. In 1985 and in 1988, Weerasinghe underwent training on mural conservation at ICCROM, Rome, Italy and rock art conservation at the Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, USA. In between these spells of training, he worked as a Lecturer in Archeology and coordinator of the conservation program at the Post Graduate Institute of Archeology in Sri Lanka. In 1989 he joined the American University in Washington D.C. in the USA, and completed his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1990. Upon his return to Sri Lanka he worked as a visiting lecturer at the Institute of Aesthetic Studies (IAS), University of Kelaniya between 1994 to 1998.

His spell at the IAS proved to be personally challenging and historically significant for the visual arts in Sri Lanka in many ways. Almost single handedly he embarked on a crusade against the archaic teaching practices and the problematic knowledge production within the Institute of Aesthetic Studies, which helped to produce number of socially sensitive politically critical and artistically radical artists. His ideology offered a new direction to their existing anxieties and his art offered them alternative alter for their explosive expressions. He became the main catalyst for the 90s art that challenged and changed all established conventions in the Sri Lankan visual art.

His 1992 exhibition “Anxiety” introduced installation work to the local artists’ community, a trend that focused on an alternative to the formalist stance of the modernists’ credo. At the same instance, this exhibition disclosed the possibilities of artistic manifestations that are reflective of broad political and social implications within a deeply personal context. The subsequent painting series ‘ Who are you soldier’ while continuing the social critique introduced a different visual aesthetics where dark browns, kaki greens and black blotches of paint confronted the viewer.

As much as the exhibition ‘Anxiety’ emphasized the guilt of a society and its cathartic need for abreaction, his subsequent exhibition “Yantra Gala and the Round Pilgrimage” in 1997 held at the Heritage Gallery, Colombo reveals the pathology of a nation and its amnesiac status. It also critically questions the society’s responsibility in its political turmoil. It was one of the most politically interventionist exhibitions in recent times. Here, in the arrangements of ‘objects’, which are labeled as ‘art work’ located in a culturally signified space, the ‘gallery’, he tried to transform the viewer’s role to that of a participant within a politically defined context. The art objects such as the main installation and the surrounding paintings become the signs and locus of memories, pain, loss due to political violence and suffering. In this exhibition he merges the personal and political into one.

Since his initial exhibitions, a trend was established where many young artists have been enticed into diversifying their aestheticism and methodologies that have included installation, conceptual, new age, and performance work.

He was commissioned by the Sri Lankan government to design the monument ‘Shrine for the Innocent’ as a remembrance for the innocent victims of the ruthless violence that the southern part of the country experienced in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was completed in 1999.

His background as an archeologist and conservator of mural paintings has allowed him constantly to look at material culture as a crucial way of understanding a society and engage in a critical discourse artistically and politically. His work ‘Archeology of Today’ series question ones existence within the historical evolution of ideology through the anomalies of materiality of a culture.

“Within the archeological discourse pottery becomes the marker of pre-modern societies. When you have a whole layer of pottery as a archeological artifacts along with a lot of contemporary material, then the archeology of today becomes a contradiction, an anomaly that begins to problematize the modern contemporariness of today…..Are we modern, semi-modern or quasi-modern?” (Jagath Weerasinghe, Theertha International Artists’ Workshop 2001)

His more recent works have tried to move away from a forthright politically interventionist theme to a more personal stance although his questioning of modern society and its ideology underlies every work of his. Perhaps his artistic strategy has changed from interrogating the public domain to the investigation of self and the tensions and workings of its existence as a socio-political being within a rapidly transforming post colonial and para-modern society.

Jagath Weerasinghe: An artist and a catalyst for change - Anoli Perera