EDINBURGH.- The Children are Now is a group exhibition that aims to represent the relationship of children to the key challenges that we face today.

A growing movement is challenging how society views and treats children. "Childism" is calling to empower children and allow their perspectives to transform social and academic institutions (a process allied to feminism and decolonising practice). In 2024, Scotland incorporated the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) into domestic law, providing a strong foundation for cultural change, embedding children’s rights into everyday life and decision making.

A partnership with Children’s Parliament will enable Child Human Rights Defenders, a group of children who work to recognise and advocate for the rights of children in Scotland, to make new artworks that will feature across all the gallery’s iconic spaces. Made with the support of artist Bob and Roberta Smith, the artworks reflect the key concerns of children across Scotland, namely: climate change education, mental health and bullying, and vapes.

The children share this platform with the work of established, international, adult artists, whose work allows us to think into the opportunities and restrictions that children – as the greatest world builders among us – face: including at school, in apartheid regimes, warzones and in the face of intergenerational trauma.

Francis Alÿs’ (Belgium) Reel-Unreel (2011) was made in Kabul during the Afghanistan War. His film follows children rolling two film canisters – unspooling and spooling—through the war-torn streets of a city known otherwise to the West through news footage, Hollywood films and post 9/11 narratives.   

Monster Chetwynd’s (UK) Hell Mouth acts as a gateway through one of the gallery spaces: its green, monstrous presence bringing an immediate, irrepressible sense of play, mischief and joy into the exhibition—whilst necessarily eating all adult and child visitors who wish to explore. In this context, it suggests the power to suspend disbelief, throw off repressive judgements and echoes the many portals found in children’s stories that allow other ways of existing to become possible.  

Ane Hjort Guttu (Norway) will present two films. Freedom Requires Free People (2011), follows eight-year-old Jens Flakstad Vold through his everyday life at school and his reflections on his experiences as a pupil. The result is an insight into an astute, critical mind, questioning what it means to achieve freedom within institutional settings. Conversation (2021) follows up with Jens ten years later, to reflect on his early quest for autonomy as well as his memory and experience of the making of the first film.  

Kemang Wa Lehulere (South Africa) works through the ongoing effects of apartheid in South Africa, often using materials sourced from educational settings to comment on the way institutions can (re)produce social inequality through the policing of information, ideas, access and bodies. A new work for this exhibition called Black Beauty (after Anna Sewell) (2025) will be a monument to the banning of books during apartheid, including the eponymous children’s book whose title alone was enough to warrant its censorship. 

Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s (Vietnam) The Boat People (2020) is set in an unknown future in the place once called Bataan, Philippines, and follows five children – perhaps the last survivors on earth—who travel the world to piece together its histories. Encountering signs of conflict, migration and colonialism (including memorials to the some of the estimated 800,000 to 2 million people who fled Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos after the fallout of the Vietnam War, many losing their lives) they undertake a process of recreating objects in wood. Burning them and sending their ashes out into the ocean, the children re-channel the power of fire and water to cleanse the destructive imprint of the world’s former (adult) inhabitants. 

Mai Nguyễn-Long (Australia) presents a body of new glazed works from her celebrated Vomit Girl project, alongside unfired clay sculptures made with the support of Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. More than four decades after visiting her father’s war-torn country of Vietnam, as an 8-year-old in 1978, Vomit Girl emerged from a viscerally sickening sense of being erased. This army of spirits form a new mythology to reclaim forbidden Vietnamese folk stories, empowering the imagination to thrive beyond fear and the ongoing impacts of violence, estrangement and intergenerational trauma.  

For decades, Bob and Roberta Smith (UK) has tirelessly advocated for art education in schools and this exhibition includes five of his distinctive sign-painted slogans and his Letter to Michael Gove (2011). As he wrote in this open letter, “Give a child a piece of paper, a brush and some colour and you put them in control. Children's art is so appealing because they have no problem with being in control of images. From Galileo to Darwin, from Caravaggio to Amy Winehouse creativity is rebellion.”

Adéla Součková’s (Czechia) expanded ritualistic drawing and printing practice seeks to reconnect with the land and often derives its energy from forms of spirituality, play and embodiment. These themes link to the children’s game of hopscotch (the scotch referring to a scratch made in the dirt), and Součková’s research found variants of the game across different eras and world cultures. This exhibition will include new floor-based games, a story-filled guidebook and powerful symbolic forms. 

Curated by James Clegg.