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.