Bundanon

Jagath Dheerasekara is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work is informed by his personal and collective memory, colonisation, and the fragility of the principles of humanity.

Born in Sri Lanka, Jagath fled the country in the early 1990s due to his political and human rights activism during Sri Lanka’s ‘87-‘89 southern rebellion and was granted political asylum in France. He was able to return to Sri Lanka in the mid ‘90s. In 2008, Jagath settled in Australia with his family. Jagath is an Amnesty International Human Rights Innovation Fund Grant recipient. He has presented his work in a number of solo and selected group exhibitions. His work is held in both institutional and private collections, which includes the Campbelltown City Council Art Collection, the Museum of Australian Photography, the State Library of New South Wales, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and the Liverpool City Council Art Collection. He lives on Gandangara Country in Western Sydney.

In Residence at Bundanon

The artist’s birth place, Sri Lanka, was successively ruled by three European colonial powers; the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British. Out of the three, the British occupation of the island as a whole put its people and the land through an exhaustive transformation. The residency project, ‘Incessant Dissonance’, interrogates the policies and ongoing effects of British colonial rule on the artist, on Sri Lankan society in general, and approaches to decolonisation within that society. ‘Incessant dissonance’ will be a body of work that encompasses immersive video installations, performances on video, mix-media installations, sculptures from found objects and an essay.