Marking the opening of Ocean Space’s 2026 exhibition season, TBA21–Academy presents Tide of Returns, an immersive exhibition running from 28th March to 11th October. Developed through the artistic research of the Repatriates Collective, the exhibition brings together artists, Indigenous communities and filmmakers from Australia’s Pacific North, South and West Africa, Europe and Latin America to explore how water shapes processes of repatriation, memory and return.
Installed across both wings of the former Church of San Lorenzo, Tide of Returns unfolds as a ceremonial landscape rather than a conventional exhibition. In the west wing, the Repatriates Collective presents a newly commissioned, multisensory environment combining sand, shell and textile figures, moving image and sound. Thousands of hand-made characters populate a vast dune, transforming the space into a living terrain of clans, songlines and ancestral relations. Anchored by sand sourced from Noeleen Lalara’s land, the installation speaks softly yet insistently of cultural survival, continuity and care — a form of resistance articulated through gentleness rather than confrontation.
Indigenous dolls created at the Anindilyakwa Art Centre and by Laimi Kakololo act as vessels of memory, appearing both sculpturally and on film, while a sound composition by Rebekah Wilson carries songs across oceans, connecting communities separated by vast distances yet bound by shared histories. The result is an intimate portrait of how knowledge, identity and responsibility are passed through generations — through land, water and storytelling.
Weinandt
In the east wing, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt presents a textile and video installation centred on gestures of care and collective healing. Blue-toned woven fabrics, threaded with dark braids, fill the space, evoking flowing water, hair, and ancestral ties. Embedded within the textiles, a three-channel video follows a cyclical performance of washing, braiding and tending to fabric in a river, drawing connections between rivers and oceans, bodies and memory. The work traces how water carries histories of resilience, binding past and present through repeated acts of care.
The themes of Tide of Returns extend into OCEAN / UNI, TBA21–Academy’s itinerant pedagogical platform. The 2025–26 edition, titled Spaces of Collaboration, focuses on the moving image as a tool for repatriation and cultural restitution, developed through collective, ocean-inspired practices.
Running concurrently, Ocean Space’s Research Room hosts Nature Speaks: Listening for Rights of Nature in Venice and Europe, curated by Pietro Consolandi and Amalia Rossi. Addressing the urgency of the Anthropocene, the exhibition foregrounds the Rights of Nature, reinforcing TBA21–Academy’s commitment to ecological protection through artistic and cultural action.
Tide of Returns positions Ocean Space once again as a site where art, ecology and lived knowledge intersect — offering not answers, but ways of listening.
Ocean Space, 28th March to 11th October, Church of San Lorenzo, Venice
Free admission – @tba21academy
About the artists
The Repatriates Collective is a collaborative artistic-research project that investigates what happens when European museums are asked to return their collections to communities with cultural and historical connections to those artworks. The repatriation of cultural belongings often involves complex political, historical, legal, and emotional factors. The collective responds to various contemporary international cases, including Austria-Mexico, the UK-Australia, Switzerland-Nigeria, France-Benin, and Germany-Namibia, employing diverse research methods to expand upon the artists’ role in these ongoing processes. For the Tide of Returns exhibition at Ocean Space, key participants include Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Kasimir Burgess, Rebekah Wilson, Syd Britten Andrews, and a group of Anindilyakwa artists, among them Noeleen Lalara, Nikisha Wanambi, Sheanah Marawili, Kaysheanne Murrugun, Annabell Amagula, Lusanne Murrugun, Marcia Mamarika, Arabella Wanambi, Elsie Bara, Lily Yantarrnga, Charmaine Kerindun, Meaghan Wanambi, Angela Robyn Williams, Maureen Bara, Maicie Lalara, Bernadette Watt, Lucinda Murrugun, Janelle Mamarika, Noelita Lalara, Shirly Yantarrnga, Stephanie Durilla, Natalie Yantarrnga, Chailene Yantarrnga, Charlene Wanambi, Alice Durilla, Sharna Wurramara, Rebecca Yarntarrnga, Rita Bara, Sue Bara, and African artists Joel Haikali, Nesindano Namises, Samson Ogiamien, and Laimi Kakololo.
Verena Melgarejo Weinandt is a German-Bolivian artist, researcher, curator, and educator. She is currently part of the ERC-funded artistic research project “Repatriates” at the Central European University in Vienna and has previously worked within the DFG Research Group “Knowledge in the Arts” at the University of the Arts Berlin. Working with performance, textiles, photography, video, and installations, she addresses colonial and patriarchal structures, using her body and (ancestral) history as tools for collective transformation, exploring how our relationships with the fictive, the imaginary, and non-human beings are ways to (re)construct both individual and collective identities. Her artistic practice has been exhibited internationally at venues including La Virreina Centre de la Imatge (Barcelona), Manifesta 14 (Pristina), the 16th Bienalsur (Buenos Aires), Bienal Sur (Cúcuta 2019), nGbK Berlin, and Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), as well as at various international film festivals. She has also curated exhibitions at the Weltmuseum Wien, Wiener Festwochen, and District School Without Center (Berlin).
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, born in Naarm (Melbourne) Australia, is an artist and filmmaker. She is a Professor of History and Director of the EU Horizon 2020 project REPATRIATES: Artistic Research in Museums and Communities in the Process of Repatriation from Europe and the collective of artists and researchers that are part of it. She earned a PhD in Art and Architectural History from Harvard University and is the author of the books Art in the Time of Colony; The Importance of Being Anachronistic:Contemporary Aboriginal Art and Museum Reparations; Botanical Drift; Bordered Lives: Immigration Detention Archive, The Contested Crown: Repatriation Politics between Mexico and Europe and the forthcoming Voyages of Belonings: Art and Repatriation, based on this project. Her artistic practice combines word and image montages in film and installations, giving voice to alternative narratives through text and performance. Her works have been presented in numerous international exhibitions and artistic research projects including at the Venice, Marrakech, Atlantic and Sharjah Biennales, ZKM, Manifesta, Wien Woche, Extracity, Savvy, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, MAA Cambridge, Royal Museums Greenwich, Frieze London, and the Wende Museum LA. She has won awards at Casablanca, Ethnokino and St Kilda film festivals
