The flow of people around the world follows the pressures and waves of societal and physical forces that have distributed us all to where we find ourselves. Since its founding, TBA21-Academy has positioned the ocean not merely as an ecological subject but as a framework for rethinking cultural memory, displacement, and collective responsibility. Its Venice venue, Ocean Space, has become a site where artistic practice and ocean advocacy converge, hosting commissions that speak directly to the communities most affected by dispossession, environmental change, and the erosion of intergenerational knowledge.
Tide of Returns (2026), the latest commission to emerge from this programme, is the work of the Repatriates Collective, an international group of artists whose shared inquiry concerns the role of art and water in shaping processes of cultural restitution and repatriation. Presented at Ocean Space from 28 March to 11 October, the exhibition provides audiences with a vessel through which to understand how water functions as a social, political, and creative experience.
Exhibition Notes: Tide Returns by the Repatriates Collective at Ocean Space, Venice
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. Following the long-term commitment of TBA21–Academy to fostering Ocean literacy and intercultural dialogue, Tide of Returns explores the role of art and water in shaping the processes of repatriation through the work of an artist collective, Indigenous communities, and filmmakers.
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 combining sand, thousands of characters made of shell and textile, video and sound. This exhibition is more than an artistic expression; it is a ceremonial act of reclamation. It is a form of homecoming that moves beyond activism, offering a more profound form of resistance. Without abrasive rhetoric or jargon it speaks with a gentleness, an unfolding, a softness—a poetic articulation of cultural survival. The stories told here are shaped by the language of the land, the sea, and the bodies that create them. This is also a portrait of possible relations between humans and the sea, and the ways in which communities teach their children about those relations, using sculptures made of shells, through stories of their families, practices, ancestors. Sand from Noeleen Lalara’s land anchors the work, with a vast dune transformed into a living landscape of totems, clans, and songlines. Indigenous dolls made at the Anindilyakwa art center and Laimi Kakololo become a chorus of ancestral messengers, acting as vessels of memory and continuity. These characters are brought to life in film and the installation is saturated in songs that carry wisdom across water, bridging two communities across continents, in a sound composition by Rebekah Wilson.
In the east wing, 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. The intertwining of hair and current evokes ancestral memory, with water carrying histories of care and resilience.
The main themes of Tide of Returns are further explored in the first semester of TBA21–Academy’s itinerant pedagogical platform OCEAN / UNI (2025–2026). This edition, titled Spaces of Collaboration, is dedicated to the moving image as a tool for repatriation and cultural restitution, developed through collective practices inspired by the Ocean.
Running alongside Tide of Returns, in the Research Room Ocean Space hosts the exhibition Nature Speaks. Listening for Rights of Nature in Venice and Europe, curated by Pietro Consolandi and Amalia Rossi. As the world navigates today’s Anthropocene this exhibition is dedicated to the Rights of Nature, highlighting TBA21–Academy’s commitment to inspiring the protection of ecosystems and biodiversity through innovative artistic and cultural practices.
Tide Returns
March 28 – October 11, 2026
Ocean Space
Church of San Lorenzo Castello 5069, Venice
Free admission
www.ocean-space.org
www.tba21.org/academy
Commissioned by TBA21—Academy, Tide of Returns presents two major site-specific works from the Repatriates Collective, exploring the role of arts and of water in shaping processes of cultural restitution and repatriation
Ocean Space, Venice:https://www.ocean-space.org
TBA21-Academy: https://www.tba21.org/academy
TBA21 on repatriation and ocean literacy programmes:https://www.tba21.org
Anindilyakwa Art Centre (referenced in exhibition notes):https://www.anindilyakwaarts.com.au
Images courtesy of TBA21 © as per image.
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. – Aristotle
