Repatriates Collective. Tide of Returns

Exhibition at Ocean Space, Venice

March 28 – October 11, 2026

Still of Tide of Returns, Groote Eylandt, 2025. Photo: Britten Syd Andrews

Academy Exhibitions

Exhibitions

Ocean Space Venice

Commissioned and produced by TBA21–Academy
In conjunction with the 61st International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia

The 2026 exhibition at Ocean Space will explore the role of sand and water through the work of a collective of artists, Indigenous communities, and filmmakers engaged in shaping the processes of repatriation. The exhibition, filling both wings of the historic Church of San Lorenzo, comprises newly commissioned multimedia works that bring together artists from Southern Africa, Europe, Australia’s Pacific North, South and West Africa, Europe, and Latin America (Britten Syd Andrews, Kasimir Burgess, Joel Haikali, Laimi Kakololo, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, the Warnindilyakwa, Rebekah Wilson and more).

In the west wing, the Repatriates Collective welcomes viewers into an immersive installation that combines sand, thousands of characters made from shell and textile, video, and sound. In the east wing, a textile–video installation by Verena Melgarejo Weinandt traces gestures of care, belonging, and collective healing. This exhibition is more than an artistic expression; it is a ceremonial act of reclamation, a form of homecoming that moves beyond activism and offers a profound form of resistance. It speaks with a gentleness, an unfolding, a softness—a poetic articulation of cultural survival.

In parallel to the main exhibition, Nature Speaks. Listening for Rights of Nature in Venice and Europe will be presented in Ocean Space's Research Room, curated by Pietro Consolandi and Amalia Rossi. Focused on Rights of Nature movements, the exhibition asks how rivers, oceans, and forests might enter democratic life as subjects with standing.

LOCATION

Ocean Space
Chiesa di San Lorenzo
Castello 5069
30122 Venezia