VENICE.- Marking the beginning of the 2026 Ocean Space exhibition season, TBA21–Academy presents Tide of Returns, an exhibition based on the artistic research of the Repatriates Collective, initiated by artist Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and formed of artists from Australia’s Pacific North, South, and West Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Continuing TBA21–Academy’s long-term commitment to fostering critical ocean literacy and intercultural dialogue, Tide of Returns explores cultural repatriation as a living, relational process in which art and water become vehicles for memory, continuity, and reconnection between communities and territories.
There is a growing international movement advocating for the repatriation of art taken by colonial powers and subsequently stored in Europe’s museums. Indigenous communities in Australia, Namibia, and many other places around the world continue to lobby for the return of their cultural objects. Two recent examples testify to the power of repatriations to the community: in 2022, the Ethnological Museum in Berlin returned 23 objects—selected by Namibian experts—plundered in part during the era of German colonization at the turn of the 20th century. In September 2023, the Manchester Museum returned 174 cultural heritage items, including a large collection of Dadikwakwa-kwa (shell dolls), to the Warnindilyakwa in Australia. Tide of Returns presents some of these old Dadikwakwa-kwa from Manchester at Ocean Space, and they are joined by a new community of thousands, made especially for the exhibition.
Tide of Returns emerges from the many small rituals that comprise artists’ ecological wisdom and care. By engaging with Indigenous cosmovisions and the shaping power of water, the artworks on view explore the potential for overcoming forms of cultural, social, and environmental violence. This exhibition is a ceremonial act of reclamation; a form of homecoming that moves beyond activism, searching for a profound form of resistance. It speaks with a gentleness, an unfolding, poetic articulation of cultural survival. The stories told here are shaped by the language of the land, the ocean, and the bodies that tell them. By using materials washed ashore, from nets to shells, these artists show new ways for living and working in the aftermath of colonial rule and extractive economies.
The exhibition sees both wings of the former Church of San Lorenzo come alive with newly commissioned multimedia works. In the west wing, the Repatriates Collective welcomes viewers into an immersive installation, From My Mother’s Country, combining sand, thousands of characters made of shell and textile, video, and sound. From My Mother’s Country follows the redressing of the Dadikwakwa-kwa in Namibian fabric in preparation for their journey to Venice. The sand dune was carried from Anindilyakwa artist Noeleen Lalara’s land in the Gulf of Carpentaria, where land and water meet at the edge of a world in flux. The soundscape in the space and the film, together with the topography of the sand dunes, evokes the Aboriginal belief that sound carries wisdom across water. Totems, clans, and songlines are embedded in the landscape, with thousands of figures transforming the dune into a chorus of ancestral messengers. Together, they bridge communities across continents, reaffirming Indigenous knowledge and resistance.
In the east wing, Weaving Connections, a textile–video installation by Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, traces gestures of care, belonging, and collective healing. Woven, blue-toned fabrics occupy the space, threaded with black braids that recall both flowing water and strands of hair. Embedded within the textile landscape, a three-channel video follows a performance of preparing, braiding, and washing textiles in a river. Through this cyclical act—hands weaving, water cleansing—the work meditates on the continuity of bodies of water, where rivers become oceans.
Weaving Connections is part of the artists' long-term development of a body of performative films and research that explores how the cultural imaginary in Germany has represented and framed Indigenous people in mainstream media and culture. Critically examining the historical formation of stereotypes and fantasies about Indigenous people since German colonialism, and their close ties to the construction of a German national identity and culture, this body of work confronts attendant forms of violence.
Built from gestures of giving and receiving, the exhibition Tide of Returns at Ocean Space invites us into the to and fro of tidal motions that will bring more in the years to come. Both spaces focus in part on returns from Germany to examine how fictions, fantasies, and stories about Indigenous people possess their own agency, shaping not only Indigenous lives but also the politics and institutions of the nation-state. Through immersive, site-specific installations, the exhibition redefines the notion of “return,” transforming cultural restitution from a political claim into an act of collective care, intergenerational transmission, and cultural survival.
Running alongside Tide of Returns, in the Research Room, Ocean Space hosts the policy lab Nature Speaks. Listening for Rights of Nature in Venice and Europe, curated by Pietro Consolandi and Amalia Rossi. Co-produced with NICHE Centre for Environmental Humanities, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, this space functions as an open laboratory where the Venetian community can collectively explore a new possible political horizon: advancing the recognition of the Venetian Lagoon as a legal entity under Italian, European, and international law. This project, arriving at a pivotal moment in the struggle for ecosystemic rights in Europe and beyond, is developed in fundamental collaboration with two activist networks: IDRA – Iniziativa per i Diritti delle Reti d’Acqua and the Confluence of European Water Bodies.
