CHILDHOODS brings together new work and work from Amber’s collection, creating a complex portrait of children's imaginative lives, the social contexts they deal with, their resilience: lives and concerns that often get overlooked. The exhibition will move between North East England and the wider world. It will move across the four decades of Side Gallery's existence.

The new gallery spaces allow more flexibility in the use of both photographs and video, and CHILDHOODS will take advantage of this; moving between Dovana Films shorts, capturing children's stories from Peru to the coasts of the Aegean, to some of the great exhibitions held in the collection: Tish Murtha's Juvenile Jazz Bands (1979), Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen's Step by Step (1984), Karen Robinson's All Dressed Up (2005). It will include Julian Germain's Classroom Portraits, developed across the world between 2004 and 2012 and James Mollison’s Where Children Sleep (2010), mediating stories of diverse children around the world, told through portraits and pictures of their bedrooms and the complex situations and social issues affecting them.

(Image: Duwa a and Shahd Sarshan, Forty Out of One Million, Syrian
Collateral, Kai Wiedenhöfer, Collateral, Kai Wiedenhöfer, 2015)