Marking the beginning of the 2026 Ocean Space exhibition season, TBA21–Academy presents Tide of Returns, an exhibition running from March 28 until October 11 based on the artistic-research of the Repatriates Collective, which is formed by artists from Australia’s Pacific North, South and West Africa, Europe, and Latin America.

The exhibition 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.

The stories told here are shaped by the language of the land, the ocean, and the bodies that tell them. As experiments with possible relations between humans and the ocean, the works in the exhibition tell communities’ stories of families, practices, ancestors. 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.  

Indigenous communities in Australia, Namibia, and many other places around the world continue to advocate for the return of their cultural objects. In May 2022, following years of advocacy from communities in Namibia, the Ethnological Museum in Berlin returned twenty-three objects. Largely plundered during the era of German colonization (1884–1919), this group of things were selected by Namibian experts for their aesthetic, cultural, and historical significance. Around the same time, the Warnindilyakwa in Australia identified a large collection of Dadikwakwa-kwa—commonly translated as shell dolls—held by Manchester Museum. In response to the community’s advocacy, Manchester Museum returned 174 cultural heritage items to the Warnindilyakwa in September 2023. 

This sand is the embodiment of our mothers.

In the first aisle, the Repatriates Collective welcomes visitors with an immersive installation that combines various elements: sand, thousands of figures made from shell and fabric, video and sound.

The installation, which at first glance appears as a vast dune composed of sand carried in part from Noeleen Lalara’s land in the Gulf of Carpentaria, where land and water meet at the edge of a world in flux. Here, the tide brings with it the detritus of global industry: tangled nets discarded from fishing vessels that drift along the shore. Once tools of sustenance, these ghost nets now threaten the life of turtles, birds, and fish. They leave a trail of destruction in their wake, suffocating the coastline.

Women like Lalara, who tends their mothers’ sand dunes overlooking the vast expanse of the Pacific, show us the resilience of communities and the ways they cultivate the resources that sustain them. 

Not only well-known antiques like the Benin Bronzes, marbles, or oil paintings have been selected for repatriation from European cultural institutions. There were also small, hand-made dolls, which are not just sculptures but sacred vessels of fertility, that were returned to the Warnindilyakwa in Australia and to Windhoek, Namibia.

The film, part of the installation and sharing the same title, begins with the digging for materials, preparing for the redressing of Dadikwakwa-kwa (shell dolls). The makers are deeply focused on their process, to which the film intimately bears witness. They are not performing for the camera but absorbed in the labor of adorning the shells as part of a wider set of social experiences. They dress the shell dolls in Namibian fabrics in preparation to send them to meet you here in Venice. Blessings are spoken to them by the elders before departing on their journey.

The soundscape in the space and in the film, together with the topography of 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.

Weaving Connections is part of the artist’s long-term development of a body of performative films and research that explore how the cultural imaginary in Germany has represented and framed Indigenous people in mainstream media and culture. 

Looking critically at 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. Fabulated identities come into play when museums and institutions draw on historical and emotional ties to connect a German audience with what they exhibit and store, while simultaneously refusing to let go of ideologies that prevent them from returning what does not belong to them.

The artwork expresses the need for a vital shift in perspective, not only on forms of violence but how we act and reenact them, when we disconnect ourselves from other ways of being. Institutions replicate separations, dichotomies and categorizations that fracture us and the more-than-human world. The artist follows the water’s path of movement and transformation, creating a continuous cycle where waters are never truly separate but exist in a state of perpetual connection. 

Threads in blue tones interwoven with black braids recall both flowing water and hair. Braids are a recurring element in the artist’s trajectory, allowing her to explore how individual and collective identities come into existence. The washing of braids reflects the water’s ability to forge relationships between all living beings, as well as its spiritual power to transform, purify, and recreate. A collective act of preparing, braiding, and washing the braids before being woven into the textiles reminds us of the care and presence this act of transformation requires. The three-channel video unfolds three performative moments into images, creating a constant flow of shifting visual relationships. 

Ultimately, Weaving Connections is a gesture, a movement. It expresses endless variations of entanglements that move in different formations through the space, reminding us that there is never just one way to display and tell a narrative of change and transformation, nor one single perspective from which to engage. The non-linearity of this work questions our definition of time within the web of connections in which we exist, pointing beyond a linear understanding of past, present, and future and the divisions made between them.

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 art works. 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. Repatriates Collective for Tide of Returns:  Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Laimi Kokololo, Noeleen Lalara, Samson Ogiamien, Kasimir Burgess, Britten Andrews, Rebekah Wilson, Christopher Williams-Wynn, Wietske Maas, Georg Oberlechner, Nick Prokesch, Miae Son, Alfredo Ledesma Quintana, Marisel Orellana Bongola, Auro Orso, Pêdra Costa, Klara Neuber, Piju, Konstantin Kormann, Julian Reinisch, Susi Rogenhofer, Manni Montana, Jesse Shipley, Jasmine Coelho, Krisztina Szabados, Wolfgang Knoepfler, Larissa Foerster, Julia Binter, Jessyca Hutchens, 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.

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.