Acts of Care: Immersive Exhibition Brings Township AIDS Project Archive to Life
by
Latitudes Editorial
Acts of Care: Immersive Exhibition Brings Township AIDS Project Archive to Life
A new immersive exhibition is set to transform decades-old archival material into a living, participatory experience, inviting audiences to witness, recognise, and actively continue a legacy of queer community care that began in Soweto, Johannesburg, more than three decades ago.
Acts of Care is an Extended Reality (XR) exhibition drawing on archival material from the Township AIDS Project (TAP), held by the GALA Queer Archive. Using virtual reality, augmented reality, and an interactive creative public space, the exhibition explores how communities in early 1990s Johannesburg and Soweto organised care, education, and advocacy in response to the HIV/AIDS crisis, at a time when the disease was poorly understood, deeply stigmatised, and often framed as a moral or political threat.
Acts of Care will be launched on 5 September at the Latitudes Centre for the Arts (LCA), Shepstone Gardens in Johannesburg. It is one of the projects in Futures_Past: Amplifying Memory with Immersive Technologies, an initiative of the Embassy of France in South Africa, Lesotho and Malawi and the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS), in partnership with Electric South, with funding from the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs.
Structured in three interconnected experiential zones representing the past, present, and future, that map directly into the Acts of Care visitor’s journey and experience of Caring (Witness), Loving (Recognise), and Sharing (Act). Each zone marks a different type of engagement, carrying visitors from an intimate historical encounter, through recognition and affirmation, to collective and public participation.
The first station
places visitors inside a VR reconstruction of an early 1990s community counselling room in Johannesburg, narrated by Enea Motaung, who ran TAP for many years. The scene draws on lived testimony to portray the quiet, often invisible acts of care that sustained communities during the crisis.
The second station
is a playful, full-body AR photo experience, drawing on the bold safe-sex campaign typography and graphic aesthetics of 1990s queer activist culture, allowing visitors to see themselves reflected within the visual language of the movement. Participants can pose, move, and experiment with identity in a joyful and unapologetic space. This station connects past activism to present-day self-expression and collective visibility.
At the third station,
visitors are invited to design their own posters, physically or digitally, using visual assets from the TAP and GALA archive. Completed works are pasted and projected onto a growing shared wall, forming a living, evolving archive of contemporary care and advocacy that builds throughout the exhibition's run.
Throughout, archival photographs, pamphlets, and testimonies from TAP and the GALA Queer Archive connect the three stations, grounding the experience in lived history.
"TAP's story has lived in our collection for almost three decades, known mostly to researchers and those who lived through the HIV/AIDS crisis. Acts of Care gives us the chance to bring that history out into the open, to let new audiences encounter it not as a static record but as something they can step into and feel. This is what it means for an archive to stay alive,” says Linda Chernis, Archivist, GALA Queer Archive.
Simon Nkoli, image courtesy of GALA Queer Archive.
"We didn't want to simply document TAP's history, we wanted people to feel what it meant to organise care under pressure, without a manual, without institutional support, and often without the language to name what was happening,” says Kieran Reid, Artistic Project Lead. “Building this in VR and AR helped us to hold onto that intimacy while still inviting people into something collective and hopeful, and creative."
The exhibition draws a deliberate line between the past and the present. As international HIV/AIDS funding, including support previously channelled through PEPFAR (the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) faces cuts that are currently affecting clinics, community health workers, and prevention programmes across South Africa, Acts of Care insists that the community-led practices of care pioneered by TAP in the 1990s remain relevant today.
“Futures_Past set out to show that archives are living resources, not just repositories of the past. Acts of Care embodies that mission entirely, taking a story of care and queer resilience from the 1990s and giving it new urgency at a moment when the very systems of care it documents are once again under threat,” says Jean Spiri, Director of IFAS.
Acts of Care is designed to engage queer communities, HIV/AIDS activists, and health workers, as well as students, researchers, and general public audiences. It runs until 1 December 2026 (World AIDS Day) at Latitudes Centre for the Arts (LCA) in Johannesburg. Parental guidance: the exhibition has an age recommendation of 16+.
In response to and alongside Acts of Care, LCA is proud to present How is a triangle the strongest shape? curated by Denzo Nyathi, this group exhibition ponders the methodologies of endurance associated with resistance, taking a particular look at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis in South Africa. Ephemera and other crafty practices are re-examined and brought to the forefront of fine art, with a queer cohort of artists — Talia Ramkilawan, Athi Patra Ruga and Sizwe Sama — practising their own forms of resistance.
Exhibition details:
Venue: Latitudes Centre for the Arts, 12 Hope Rd, Mountain View, Johannesburg
