01
Past · Care · VR
Witness
A VR reconstruction of an early 1990s community counselling room, narrated by Enea Motaung, portrays the quiet and often invisible acts of care that sustained communities during the crisis.
The project
Care is an action.
An Extended Reality exhibition transforming archival material from the Township AIDS Project into a living, participatory experience of queer community care.
Read the press release ↗Township AIDS Project
An extraordinary model of queer care.
The Township AIDS Project (TAP) was founded in 1989 at Ipelegeng Community Centre in Soweto. Led for much of its life by nurse Enea Motaung, TAP provided safer-sex education, counselling, HIV testing, support groups, home-based care and volunteer training.
With Simon Nkoli, who ran TAP’s Gay People’s Health Forum, members marched at the first Johannesburg Pride in 1990. TAP insisted on speaking plainly about sex, sexuality, HIV and AIDS at a time of enormous silence and stigma.
TAP closed in 2006. Much of what remains is held in GALA’s Simon Nkoli Collection, covering the organisation’s most active years. Acts of Care invites audiences to encounter this history as something they can step into, feel and continue.
“Memory must do more than commemorate. It must generate care.”
Making the VR experience
From presence to place.
Volumetric capture and environment-building bring the people, textures and archival language of the Township AIDS Project into the reconstructed counselling room.
Artist statement
Rituals of care and remembrance.
Acts of Care was shaped by Director and Creative Lead Tiisetso Dladla, whose work as an immersive artist, filmmaker and teacher explored how archives can be activated through interactive storytelling. Tiisetso’s creative vision grounds the exhibition’s invitation to encounter history by witnessing, recognising and acting.
In the early stages of the project, Associate Producer Jordan Green found John Pegge’s keynote address to the First Regional AIDS Conference for Lesbians and Gay Men, held at Ipelegeng Community Centre by TAP in October 1992. Pegge described the Homomonument in Amsterdam and a practice that had grown around it: placing flowers left after a funeral on the monument.
Pegge called for communities to develop their own rituals for expressing grief, healing pain and flourishing. That idea runs beneath both TAP’s work and this exhibition. It also echoes Simon Nkoli’s TAP pamphlet, Loving Ourselves, Sharing Each Other and Caring for Our Lives: work grounded in loving, sharing and caring—out loud and without shame.
Tiisetso and Jordan both passed away before the exhibition opened. Their imagination, humour and attention to the details that matter can be felt throughout Acts of Care. We make it in TAP’s honour, and in theirs.
“Memory must do more than commemorate. It must generate care.”
The exhibition journey
02
Present · Love · AR
Recognise
A playful, full-body AR photo experience draws on the bold typography and graphic language of 1990s queer safe-sex campaigns, connecting past activism to present-day self-expression and collective visibility.
03
Future · Share · Poster-making
Act
Visitors design posters using visual assets from the TAP and GALA archives. Their anonymous work may be displayed, published and projected onto a growing shared wall: a living archive of contemporary care and advocacy.