Witness Collection
- May 12
- 4 min read
Updated: May 31
Tuesday 26 May 2026
TLDR
Honouring HIV Long Term Survivors on HIV Long Term Survivors Awareness Day on 5 June #HLTSAD
24 hand-painted abstract portraits paired with para-fictional narratives shaped by research, community knowledge, and lived experience
Witness: honouring HIV Long Term Survivors
STORIES: Witness presents 24 hand-painted gouache portraits of para-fictional HIV long-term survivors, honouring decades of survival for HIV Long Term Survivors Awareness Day (5 June).
The collection represents people living with HIV across Australia, Rwanda, India, Russia, Ukraine, Vietnam, Timor-Leste, Papua New Guinea, and Taiwan, spanning diagnoses from 1984 to 2002. It honours those who have lived with HIV for decades, who buried friends and lovers, who waited years for medicine that would keep them alive. These are people who were told they had months to live and are now in their 60s and 70s. People who contracted HIV before effective treatment existed. People born with the virus who have never known life without it.
Parafictive personas
These para-fictional narratives are not real people. While inspired by the real experiences of those who've lived decades with HIV, each individual portrayed is an invented persona grounded in the historical accuracy of the lived experience. The names, stories, history, locations, and testimonials, are all informed by research, community knowledge, and lived experience.
Each persona is a constructed narrative, a fictional individual holding emotional and experiential truth. Some originate in the pre-HAART (highly active anti-retroviral therapy) years when survival meant waiting for medicine that didn't yet exist, others in Russia's 1990s epidemic, another from Ukraine's delayed treatment access, two from the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and several intersect with Australia's migration policies.
As an artist working with themes of witness, survival, and resilience, parafiction allows me to honour the truth of these experiences without appropriating individual real lives.
The testimonial voice
On the blockchain, each portrait carries a longer description written in the subject's voice. First person. This decision was deliberate.
Medical and historical language creates distance. Third-person narration positions the artist as authority over the subject. First-person testimonial centres the humanity and agency of the person living the experience, even when that person is a para-fictional construction. It's also a choice that aligns with documentary and oral history traditions: the witness speaks. We listen.
Pre-HAART survivors
Roughly 30% of the collection represents pre-HAART survivors; people diagnosed before 1996 when effective treatment became available. These are the people who survived on hope, stubbornness, and luck. They watched friends die while waiting for medicine that didn't yet exist.
Robert, diagnosed 1987. Trevor, 1988. Frank, 1988. Stephen, 1989. Meera, contracted HIV 1993-94 as a child in India, unaware. Ntwali, 1993 in Rwanda. Keza, 1994 during the genocide.
These survivors carry a particular kind of weight: survivor guilt, the knowledge that they're alive when so many others aren't.
Diversity matters
The collection also represents the breadth of HIV long-term survival: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people navigating racism and stigma in healthcare systems. Refugees fleeing genocide, war, and persecution. Trans people struggling for both HIV care and gender-affirming healthcare. Immigrants escaping countries where treatment didn't exist or stigma was lethal. Serodiscordant couples, straight and gay. People born with HIV. Heterosexual couples who live with HIV and people whose diagnoses reshaped their identities and life paths. HIV is not a single story. It never was.
Recognising HIV long term survivors
HIV Long Term Survivors Awareness Day exists because real people living with HIV for decades are still here. Still showing up. Still carrying the weight of outliving a generation. They deserve recognition, not as heroes or inspiration, but as people who have survived and are surviving.
STORIES: Witness is my attempt to honour that. To sit with the complexity of survival. The grief that never ends, the resilience that looks nothing like triumph, the quiet determination to keep going.
Most of the time, as someone living with HIV and knowing many survivors, at times it was difficult to work on this collection. These portraits won't comfort you. They're not meant to.
Perhaps they'll make you pause.
Perhaps they'll make you ask: What does it mean to witness?
What was witnessed during this epidemic?
And what are we still witnessing?
Trevor - diagnosed 1986 and hid his own status at work for over a decade
Jill - diagnosed 1990 during a routine medical check
Wei - an international student from Taiwan diagnosed 2015
Michael - contracted HIV through a blood transfusion in 1984 when he was five years old
Andrea - diagnosed in 1995 before transitioning in 2003
João - diagnosed at 28 years old, in Dili early-2000s
Ben & Laura - diagnosed 2001 at 19 years old before meeting and marrying Laura in 2015
Martin - diagnosed in 1994 before medical transition for gay transmen was understood
Dr Chen - diagnosed in 1993 during her medical residency before specialising in infectious disease treating hundreds of people living with HIV
Aunty Janice - Wiradjuri woman diagnosed in 1993
Daniel - diagnosed in 1999 as a high school teacher, terrified students or parents would find out
Mai - diagnosed in 1996 while training to be a nurse
Stephen - diagnosed in 1989 while he was a touring musician playing pubs across Australia
Kila - born with HIV in 1997 in Port Moresby
Yuri - diagnosed in 2000 at 25 years old during Ukraine's epidemic peak
Sarah - diagnosed in 2000 at age 22 after a relationship breakup
Makoto - diagnosed in mid-1990s in Tokyo
Oksana - contracted HIV at 15 years old in Moscow during Russia's HIV epidemic in 1998
Frank - diagnosed in 1988, lost his partner to AIDS five years later
Meera - contracted HIV in 1993-94 after an arranged marriage in rural India as a child
Ntwali - contracted HIV in 1993 at 24 years in Rwanda
Keza - contracted HIV during the 1994 Rwandan genocide at age 12
Helen - diagnosed in 2000 in her early 30s after an overseas business trip
Robert - diagnosed in 1987, when a positive result felt like a death sentence
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- Craig / Artipodean
STORIES: Witness is part of an ongoing 2026 STORIES series exploring intimate human experience through compressed narrative and hand-painted portraiture.
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