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Ocean Space’s discursive new programme in Venice opens with a conversation between Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, moderated by ArtReview editor-in-chief Mark Rappolt.
\n\n\n\nAt Ocean Space, the artistic and research centre of TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Venice, Tide of Returns approaches repatriation not as a discrete act of restitution, but as a longer, more complex process of repair – one that unfolds across bodies, landscapes and generations. Conceived by the Repatriates Collective (a collective of artists from Australia’s Pacific North, South and West Africa, Europe and Latin America) and curated by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, the exhibition positions ‘return’ as a process that is both unstable and ongoing: a movement shaped as much by water as by law or policy, and by ceremony as much as by institutional negotiation.
\n\n\n\nInstalled across the former Church of San Lorenzo – a space already marked by histories of trade, empire and circulation – the exhibition resists the neutrality of the gallery. Instead, it draws attention to the building’s own entanglement with the flows of goods and power that underpin the histories of displacement it addresses. Within this context, the works operate less as representations than as active sites of transmission, where ancient forms of knowledge and ritual are reactivated. As Markus Reymann, Co-Director of TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, has noted: “The Church of San Lorenzo is not a white cube. It is a building shaped by centuries of trade, faith, empire, and the restless circulation of political ambitions, people and goods over the Mediterranean; it breathes with the lagoon and carries within its walls the residues of histories that demand to be read differently. The encounter between the Collective’s practice and the church of San Lorenzo produces something that exceeds documentation: a confrontation with the forces of displacement that are as much present in Venice’s own history as they are in the archives and communities with which the artists have engaged.”
\n\n\n\nIn the west wing, the Collective’s From My Mother’s Country forms a dense, immersive landscape composed of sand, shell, textile, sound and moving image. Thousands of handmade dolls – each a named, individual entity – populate dune-like formations that evoke both ceremonial grounds and shifting terrain. These figures are not symbolic placeholders but vessels of knowledge: in Namibia, such dolls function as tools for teaching cycles of life, kinship and land relations, their making and care embedded within intergenerational practice.
\n\n\n\nHere, that knowledge is carried across geographies. The installation follows the preparation and redressing of these dolls before their journey, accompanied by spoken blessings from elders. The effect is cumulative rather than didactic: a gathering of voices, materials and gestures that insist on continuity despite rupture.
\n\n\n\nIf this work foregrounds return as collective movement, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt’s Weaving Connections in the east wing turns to the slower labour of repair. Blue-toned textiles hang in suspended formations, threaded with long black braids that recall both waterways and strands of hair. Within this woven environment, a three-channel video documents acts of braiding, washing and preparation performed in a river – gestures that repeat, accumulate and dissolve.
\n\n\n\nThe work draws a direct line between water and relation: braiding becomes a way of binding bodies to one another and to place, while washing, here, invokes transformation rather than purification. Rivers are not endpoints but continuities, flowing into oceans and back again. In this cyclical logic, return is never complete; it is a process of ongoing negotiation, one that challenges the fixed categories – object, subject, origin, ownership – on which colonial systems depend.
\n\n\n\nAcross the exhibition repatriation is framed as something more than the physical return of objects. It becomes a practice of reactivating relationships that were never entirely severed, despite the violence of their interruption. This emphasis on relationality extends into the wider programme at Ocean Space, where conversations, workshops and assemblies foreground cultural ownership, environmental justice and the rights of ecosystems themselves.
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ArtReview is partnering with Ocean Space for this discursive strand with Between Tides: Gatherings on Return, a half-day event (10.00–13.00) that brings the exhibition’s concerns into a shared, public forum. The programme opens with a conversation between Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, moderated by ArtReview editor-in-chief Mark Rappolt, before expanding into the second session of an ongoing symposium structured around the exhibition’s core premise: that repatriation is not a fixed outcome but a living, ceremonial and polyphonic practice.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWhere Ocean Space, 5069 Campo San Lorenzo, 30122 Venezia
When Friday 8 May 2026
In Conversation Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, moderated by ArtReview editor-in-chief Mark Rappolt
RSVP here