The first of three Eurovisions exhibitions at Side Gallery, marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Solidarity, the broad anti-Soviet movement in Poland, emerged in the shipyards of Gdansk in 1980. It was repressed, but from 1985, in the Soviet Union itself, Mikhail Gorbachev began introducing the policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). Throughout the Eastern Bloc, change became inevitable.

Reflecting that early, tentative openness, in 1987 there was an exchange project between Amber Films and the East German film company DEFA. The first independent western film company to have documented life in East Germany, Amber made From Marks & Spencer to Marx and Engels, looking at the shipbuilding and fishing town of Rostock. In the aftermath of the Black Monday stock market collapse, DEFA documented the imminent collapse of Western capitalism in Newcastle and North Tyneside.

In 1988 Amber photographer Richard Grassick began identifying East and West European photography galleries that might share Side’s sensibilities. Gallery 4 in Cheb, Czechoslovakia invited him to one of a series of workshops the gallery was organising. He met Dana Kyndrova and saw her work, The Russians. He saw some of Jindrich Streit’s work at Gallery 4 and decided to visit the photographer in his home village of Sovinec in South East Moravia to discuss a potential exhibition. Side was making arrangements for this when the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989. The exhibition, Sovinec, came to the gallery in 1990.

Mark Power’s work on the Berlin Wall and on Poland, together with Paul Lowe’s documentation of the Romanian Revolution were shown in 1990 as part of a Side Gallery NOW! exhibition, Glimpses of Change in the East. In the new, unfolding possibilities, Side and Gallery 4 decided to try a series of international photographic workshops/residencies. There was a trial run in Crook, County Durham in 1992, followed by a full workshop there the following year. There were workshops in Amiens (1994), in Cheb (1995) and Essen (1996).

Dana Kyndrova’s The Russians was shown at Side Gallery, coinciding with her participation in the Crook workshop of 1993. Jindrich Streit, who was also part of the Crook workshop, stayed for a longer residency in Rookhope, developing the exhibition project, Village is a Global World.