the ocean space turns the return into a living landscape
Inside Ocean Space in Venice, the former Church of San Lorenzo holds the Tide of Returns with a sense of weight already built into its walls. The long nave, the weathered stone and the lagoon just beyond the edges of the city give report a charged setting for thinking about returning to water, memory and displaced cultural objects.
Presented by TBA21–Academy, the exhibition opens the 2026 season at Ocean Space and runs from March 28 to October 11, 2026, alongside 61st Venice Art Biennale. Based on the artistic research of the Repatriates Collective and curated by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, the project brings together artists, filmmakers and Indigenous communities from North, South and West Africa, Australia, the Pacific, Europe and Latin America.
Its central question is immediate: what does it mean to return when the path of return is shaped by laws, ceremonies, family memory, and the ocean itself?
Repatriates Collective, From My Mother’s Country, 2026. exhibition exhibition Tide of Returns, Ocean Space, Venice. commissioned and produced by TBA21-Academy. photo by Jacopo Salvi
repatriation moves through sand, shell and song
Opposite the two wings of the former church, Tide of Returns treats repatriation as a lived process. The exhibition begins with cultural artifacts removed from colonial histories and kept in museum collections away from the communities that created them.
TBA21 notes two recent benchmarks: the return of twenty-three objects from the Berlin Ethnological Museum to Namibia in 2022 and the return of 174 cultural heritage objects from the Manchester Museum to the Warnindilyakwa community in Australia in 2023.
In the west wing, the Collective Returnees present document From my mother’s countrya newly commissioned installation of reddish sand, thousands of small figures, video and sound. The figures are formed from shell, grasses and cloth, gathered on the ground as a landscape of bodies and ancestral presence.
Sand from Anindilyakwa country fills the space with the color and texture of the place, while the installation contains stories of tribe, kinship and song through material rather than explanation.
Repatriates Collective, From My Mother’s Country, 2026. exhibition exhibition Tide of Returns, Ocean Space, Venice. commissioned and produced by TBA21-Academy. photo by Jacopo Salvi
woven water in the east wing
In the east wing, German-Bolivian artist Verena Melgarejo Weinandt present document Textile Connectionsa textile and video installation that follows water through fabric, hair and gestures. Blue-toned textiles hang inside the former church, threaded with black braids that suggest river currents and threads of memory.
A three-channel video follows a performance of fabric preparation, weaving and washing in a river, bringing the work back to the body as a place where cultural knowledge can be transferred.
During the opening program of the Biennale, Melgarejo Weinandt also appeared Braid connections within Ocean Space, extending the installation through movement and touch.
The act of knitting becomes a way of maintaining the relationship across the distance. It is simple to follow and dense in meaning, drawing attention to work that often lies outside the official stories of recovery.
Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Weaving Connections, 2026. exhibition exhibition of Tide of Returns, Ocean Space, Venice. commissioned and produced by TBA21-Academy. photo by Jacopo Salvi
the lagoon enters the exhibition
Venice gives the work a special intensity. A city built through water, trade and traffic becomes the site for an exhibition of objects and knowledge that have been swept away from their places of origin.
At Ocean Space, the lagoon is never a neutral setting. It pushes against the exhibition’s language of tides, intersections and return, while the former church holds these works within a building already marked by histories of movement.
This larger ecological context continues in the research room, where nature speaks. Listening for Rights of Nature in Venice and Europe runs alongside Tide of Returns.
Curated by Pietro Consolandi and Amalia Rossi and co-produced with the NICHE Center for Environmental Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the research unit examines the legal recognition of the Venetian Lagoon as a living entity. The pair places cultural restoration and ecological justice in close conversation, with water functioning as both subject and method.
Repatriates Collective, From My Mother’s Country, 2026. exhibition exhibition Tide of Returns, Ocean Space, Venice. commissioned and produced by TBA21-Academy. photo by Jacopo Salvi
repair as active practice
Tide of Returns offers a way to think about gentleness as work, and it does so through touch, song, fabric, sand and ceremony. The show locates forms of repair that move with the rhythms of communities and not institutions. It gives space to return as something unfinished, held through relationships as much as through objects.
In the end, the tide becomes more than just an image. It becomes a structure for the exhibition itself, moving between Venice and Anindilyakwa Country, between Namibia and Europe, between museum collections and living cultural practice. Tide of Returns asks the viewer to stay with this movement and understand the return as an ongoing act of attention.
Repatriates Collective, From My Mother’s Country, 2026. exhibition exhibition Tide of Returns, Ocean Space, Venice. commissioned and produced by TBA21-Academy. photo by Jacopo Salvi
