By: Ashima Shukla, Staff Writer
The first winter of the pandemic, I was in Shanghai visiting my family when the first news reports began circulating — something about a new pneumonia, a city in lockdown. Within days, my family and I had boarded a flight to India, seeking temporary refuge. Three days before our flight back, India closed its borders. Airports emptied. Around the world, our lives shrank to the size of our homes. For millions around the world, it meant grieving in isolation, watching suffering multiply. It meant exposure to the deep inequities of our world, where access to safety, care, and health depended on privilege, geography, and luck.
Over time, things seemed to return to normal. However, the virus, though silenced, persisted, reshaping bodies and altering lives long after the headlines moved elsewhere.
That collective amnesia of normalcy is what Living With Long COVID, a photography exhibition co-hosted by the Museum of Vancouver, SFU’s Faculty of Health Sciences, and the Post-COVID Interdisciplinary Clinical Care Network (PC-ICCN), attempts to break. On view at the museum from October 4, 2025, to March 22, 2026, this exhibition invites visitors into the often-overlooked world of the reality of COVID-19, asking us to confront what our systems and empathy have failed to care for.
Long COVID affects one in nine Canadians. Its symptoms, numbering over 200, range from fatigue to organ damage and dysautonomia. Those living with it continue to fight for recognition, often gaslit by health systems unprepared to treat chronic conditions and dismissed by workplaces that equate productivity with personal worth. As the exhibition’s co-organizer, researcher, and long-hauler (those who are suffering from Long COVID), Kayli Jamieson reminds us, “The impact of Long COVID is not just medical — it’s economic, social, and deeply personal. We are isolated not only by our symptoms, but from lost relationships. The suffering compounds when we face silence, disbelief, and doubts from friends, family, employers, and even healthcare providers.”
But the exhibit resists the cruel narratives of ableism that demand a so-called “post-COVID-19” reality. Its community-based participatory arts approach allows it to transform research into solidarity. 46 participants from across Canada responded to a call to document a day in their lives as long-haulers, contributing over 240 photographs and reflections that make the immense impact of the virus all too real.
These images clearly portray adaptation, despair, persistence, and quiet revolt of these participants.
A rare outing in someone’s new wheelchair. A medical journal documenting continuous pain for dismissive doctors. A table top full of medications. A makeshift work station to accommodate life with Long COVID. Each picture insists: we are still here.
But the exhibition is more than about suffering. It is also about connection and community. Near the end, one finds a wall for handwritten notes from visitors. “Feeling seen,” one reads. “Mask up,” another encourages. These words, fragile and immediate, form a counter-archive to the erasure we see around us. In a society eager to return to “normal,” Living with Long COVID asks what normal ever meant, and who it served.
Thus, it reclaims the politics of visibility. It reminds us that art, when rooted in care, can hold what medicine and policy too often fail to bring to light: the human complexity of survival. Visit the exhibition and wear a mask as a gesture of solidarity, a recognition that healing should be a collective responsibility.
