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Painting show in memoriam of the US-Bangla plane crash victims
On March 19, a week after the US-Bangla plane crashed at Tribhuvan International Airport, The Mithila Yain gallery in Thamel held a vigil/exhibition of paintings dedicated to the men, women and children who perished in the event.On March 19, a week after the US-Bangla plane crashed at Tribhuvan International Airport, The Mithila Yain gallery in Thamel held a vigil/exhibition of paintings dedicated to the men, women and children who perished in the event. The exhibition, titled Sraddhanjali, was set up in a way that the organisers felt would best facilitate reflection and mourning.
A trail of red paint leads attendees into the gallery space where beneath each of the paintings is a commemorative candle. The number of paintings on show corresponded to the number of victims and as such served as a gesture of condolence. Painter Shyam Sundar Yadav, who also doubles as curator of the Gallery, had created all 49 of the displayed works, the content of which reflected the stories of witnesses, victims and survivors of the plane crash.
On attendance were more than a few medical students as well as several doctors, politicians, and dignitaries from the Bangladeshi consulate. Most notable perhaps were the doctors, some of whom had been among the first to tend the survivors of the wreckage. In the hours following the disaster, Yadav, who speaks Bengali, had volunteered at hospitals, translating for the Bangladeshi crash survivors. Doing so had meant conversing with anguished survivors who were riddled with guilt. He had also witnessed the trauma of relatives who had struggled to identify the charred and mangled corpses of loved ones. These experiences were what had prompted Yadav to make his 49 paintings.
According to Yadav, painting brutal experiences is often done in an effort to keep painful details alive in the mind. One only does so with the hope of transcending them, not through the consolation of philosophy but by way of expressing the event in its tragic, almost comic fullness. In the wake of tragedy, art can never be consolation but sometimes it does seem as if a virtue.