Illustrator Tahira Rifath is on a mission to draw portraits of the 258 victims of the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka
After the bombings that rocked Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, social media erupted in anger. People everywhere came out with all guns blazing, against the perpetrators of the attack. In the ensuing frenzy, they almost forgot why they were angry. The 258 victims who lost their lives became a mere figure that leapt out of newspaper headlines. It was to humanise them, to give them back their identities, that 27-year-old Tahira Rifath, an illustrator from Colombo, decided to draw their portraits. “I wanted to bring the attention back to the victims,” she says. “They were people like you and me. They lived full lives and must have had aspirations and done incredible things. They were someone’s mother, father, partner, sibling or child.”
This story is from the July 28, 2019 edition of THE WEEK.
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This story is from the July 28, 2019 edition of THE WEEK.
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