The Ocean of Repatriation: Where the Tide Brings Back

Curator, artist, and theorist Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll discusses ‘Tide of Returns’, a landmark exhibition by the Repatriates Collective that reimagines repatriation as care, ceremony, and collective futurity.

23 June 2026

At TBA21- Academy’s Ocean Space in Venice, ‘Tide of Returns’ refuses to treat repatriation as a completed transaction. Conceived by the Repatriates Collective and curated by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, the exhibition approaches return as an ongoing process of restoring relationships between people, ancestors, land, water, and cultural memory.

Bringing together Indigenous artists, activists, researchers, and knowledge keepers from across geographies, the exhibition unfolds through shell figures, braided narratives, songlines, and shifting tidal imaginaries. Rather than focusing solely on the restitution of objects, ‘Tide of Returns’ asks what forms of repair become possible when return is understood as care, transmission, and collective responsibility.

Zinnenburg Carroll reflects on Indigenous exhibition architectures, the politics of gentleness, collective authorship, and the radical futures that emerge when museums prioritise relationships over ownership.

Suzette Bell-Roberts: ‘Tide of Returns’ frames repatriation not as a transaction, but as a relational and ceremonial process. How did you approach curating an exhibition that resists institutional closure and instead remains open and ongoing?

Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll: Thank you for this formulation – these terms are important to me – the refusal to treat what is unquantifiable as a transaction. Yet refusal is only a step away from contexts in which I have not wanted to present my work. But my approach in this show is the opposite of refusal – building a utopian feminist collectivity in which the ceremonial practise is not a reified indigenous performance, some sort of auto-ethnography, but rather tries to attend to the rituals that we are doing in order to survive and ceremonies we are accompanying and leading even when artists are typically a minor key in the bold ovations made around decolonial repatriation politics. My approach has also been to refuse institutional affiliations with museums, so I can take many years to respond to what happens on the ground. The transactional and finite nature leaves you feeling expendable. Whereas, if it is to be a restorative method, repatriation is about the endless process of finding one’s ancestors and nurturing them through small, regular, everyday rituals, feeding our souls in the process.

The exhibition situates water as both medium and metaphor, carrying memory, grief, and continuity. How did this elemental logic shape your curatorial methodology and the spatial choreography of the works?

I designed a shoreline to relate to the architecture of Ocean Space and to evoke the sense that the sandstone of the walls was once part of the ocean, just as the dunes were once the ocean floor. As we will return to water, that slow crumbling of stone and shell into sand and sea is part of the process. When we are in the installation, the line between being above and below water, the line between being on the white or red ochre sand of the iron rich soil, that polychromy that is in the stones of the church is the same polychrome – red and white colour – as is in Groote Eylandt Dingala, a specific place in the Gulf of Carpentaria, but also a material resonant beyond the shores of the Anindiliyakwa in Australia.

The Anindiliykwa say the shells come to the shore on the high tide when they want to join the people. The tide is the bearer of the bodies of these children that are then made into the shell dolls, the avatars of future generations.

We are oceanic people, and thus we live with the tides and along the tide lines. The tide lines bring things forward, as Markus Reymann said in his Preface to our Reader. It washes things up – the rubbish that suffocates our marine wildlife, the plastics, macro and micro – and the terror of our ocean that is struggling to survive is illustrated daily in that place where the ocean washes itself and us. That tide line that is neither land nor sea. The line moves and is alive with the materials that the ocean brings to it, and we who live with the ocean also bring to it. It is that imbrication of humans and the environment that we are investigating in our research.

Tide charts are like musical charts; I read them daily to know what is coming. The tide is my oracle.

The tide is not just a metaphor for the coming and going of repatriation claims, of demands for the return of ancestral beings that are drowned out by their forced removal. Rising tides threaten both Venice and the Pacific islands prone to flooding. Climate refugees are already forced to evacuate Pacific islands.

Our interest in repatriation is a reply to the call to work as artists to make stories that travel with the tides and can survive these rises.

Working with the Repatriates Collective, whose members span multiple geographies and Indigenous knowledge systems. How did you negotiate authorship, voice, and responsibility within a curatorial framework that itself seeks to decentralise authority?

Decentering authorship is something I’ve been doing more and more in my writing and making, from humble citation to co-authorship and attention to all those who contribute. I think an interesting question here would be to go deeper into what collectivity is, it’s not just a method but also a political claim: it is about whose knowledge weighs in, or gets to be heard, and how this can intervene infrastructurally. The Repatriates Collective – to stick with tangible and presently lived experiences – is intervening into infrastructures that reproduce inequalities, and to reproduce instead different possible conditions – oriented by care, a certain slowness of speed, and intergenerational transmission rather than transaction. Collectivity in this sense could be considered as a “sabotage” of centripetal infrastructures (to cite Wietske Maas).

The exhibition speaks in what has been described as a “gentleness” rather than an overtly activist register. How do you understand this poetics of softness as a form of resistance within the histories of colonial violence that underpin the project?

Change is not just asserted; it is demonstrated. Just as politics can be demonstrated for – without reduction to a single slogan.

Let me share a poem that resonates with the idea in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: “No, it’s a strange beach; each body is a strange beach and if you let in the excess emotion you will recall the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads”.

In foregrounding practices such as weaving, braiding, and the making of shell figures, the exhibition draws on embodied, intergenerational forms of knowledge. How do these gestures complicate dominant museum logics of display and preservation?

Conventions of display and preservation differ across cultures, and ‘Tides of Return’ presents the Anindiliyakwa shell dolls within Country (a central term in indigenous Australian cosmology), from which the woven, beaded, and braided stories emerge.

I consistently work against conventions of European art display for art that does not originate in the white-cube museum environment, and that is also very much what this exhibition is about. The sand dune, braids, sound installation: these are media of transmission that relate directly to Country and to bodies, thereby shifting the vitrified separation between viewer and viewed that conservation standards often insist upon by putting artworks behind glass. Preservation means something very different when culture is something you live daily, not a reified commodity alienated from your labour and body. Then, to preserve is to enliven within culture.

‘Tide of Returns’ emerges within a broader global movement advocating for the restitution of looted cultural objects. How does the exhibition position itself in relation to these legal and institutional debates, and where does it diverge from them?

We are positioned as artist activists leading and responding to repatriation claims. The project grows out of a direct engagement with the institutional, legal, and scientific state of the art in repatriation, and we have experts from all those fields on our team who draw on their expertise in specific ways for each project. For example, in 2025, I built and gifted to the museum the means to transport the most fragile of “objects” to overturn the political instrumentalisation of conservation.

The definitions of loans and properties between Switzerland and Nigeria, Germany and Namibia, and Australia and the Manchester Museum are matters we have hashed out in publications, conferences, and the legal documents accompanying the returns. Our notions of private property require decolonisation, and our institutions need structural change. I see myself as an infrastructural activist who works closely within but not for institutions.

The immersive installation transforms Ocean Space into a living landscape of songlines, totems, and ancestral presences. How did you think about the ethics of translating such culturally specific cosmologies into a European exhibition context?

Ocean space, being a repurposed ritual architecture made to amplify the voice (in my mind), is not a standard white cube. Of course, any exhibition in Europe will not be able to transcend that locational restraint, with which comes the whole history of impositions on imported artwork (a critical history that we carefully crafted “ethics guidelines” to address). However, as far as possible (and I love this question because we spent a lot of time on this), I designed ‘Tide of Returns’ as part of my thinking about Aboriginal exhibition architectures. For example, the ways in which time is experienced are circular, an Everywhen that perceives time as simultaneous rather than linear. I modelled the dunes to create a parkour in which the viewer circles the archipelago and encounters the archipelagic thinking through the relationship between their own body and the miniature dune and population.

The dunescape also returns the shell dolls to the original context in which they were played with on Groote Eylandt, as documented in the 1950s photographs Peter Woosley took. That was a departure from the ways in which these had been shown before, framed on the wall, arranged in orderly squares, like Damian Hirst’s butterflies. For me, bringing “Mother’s Country” to Venice as the body that hosts these extraordinary self-portraits is an act, with Noeleen Lalara and all those involved, of honouring the knowledge that the previous generations and our mothers transferred to us. With that focus as our departure point, our cosmologies are different from a formal consideration of display. The legibility of that “translation” on an emotional level could be registered in the audience, as they expressed feelings woven into connection to that. So we also need to depart from the idea that everything is visible and instead look at the process by which exhibitions like this are made.

I shared your questions with our collective, and the Anindiliyakwa sent this response in their own words (penned by Britten Andrews):

In the squares of Venice, beneath the arches of San Lorenzo at Ocean Space, dadikwakwa-kwa populate a sand dune on a level nobody has seen before. The dolls bud in clusters, en masse; it is a feast for the eyes, a hunting ground for the imagination. As the doors open for the Anindilyakwa artists Danjibana and Annabell on their initial visit to the cathedral, their hearts fill with nostalgic yearning for country, but on contemplation soon fill with happiness. They are proud of what has been accomplished and of what ‘Tide of Returns’ represents. The dune that perfectly mantels their dolls is both an homage to Danjibana’s mother’s country, Dingala, and a Gondwanic bond to the dunes of Namibia, the homelands of the collaborative artists. It feels right for the Indigenous artists who have travelled far.

Dadikwakwa-kwa are cone shells transformed into shell dolls. It is a flowy word with aerated vowels that sounds appropriate amongst Italian, and typable too, as the alliterated “kwa’s” run through the fingers in harmonic arpeggio on the keys. The shells, transformed into shell-dolls, were used traditionally by Anindilyakwa mothers and grandmothers to teach and tell stories in the sand to their daughters and granddaughters. Their use was lost in the changes that come with time, but they are not forgotten. The repatriation of artefacts from Manchester Museum, including doll shells made in the 1940s, was a vital link in the chain of memory.

The repatriation originated the discussion, and the encouragement from the oldest lady in Umbakumba originated the activity. “Make them alive again!” Old Edith Mamarika proclaimed. So, with obedience to tradition and delight in creativity, the horizons thickened with dadikwakwa-kwa as the hands of many Anindilyakwa ladies began collecting the shells and inspiring them, forming the milieu we now know.

When the dadikwakwa-kwa were returned from Manchester, the sentiment in the Anindilyakwa community was that their time in the museum was spent alone, deprived of company, akwukawura. Their loneliness was typical of an institution: clinical, footnoted, temperature-controlled, silenced.

The curation of ‘Tide of Returns’ is an important consideration and heartfelt by the Anindilyakwa artists, and they refer to the exhibition as the angalya, home for their shell-dolls. They recognise their sands not only as adornment but as accompanying. It is an important consideration of culture done creatively. It is the antithesis of taxonomical display, which would leave the dadikwakwa-kwa unheard. In ‘Tide of Returns’, dadikwakwa-kwa are incumbent in their sand utopia. Now their story may continue: Janus-faced in honouring the repatriation, but embracing this new story.

Dadikwakwa-kwa are storytellers, and they are moved by hand like the chess player in sand. They can make the listener attentive; they make you follow the story by hand and by voice. The words accompany the stories being eavesdropped on by the shores, and come with a use of language. The Anindilyakwa people refer to their dadikwakwa-kwa as warijira, meaning “children”. The epithet extends kinship into the dadikwakwa, and this notion takes restitution beyond objects to include mindsets of perception and of inspiritment in landscape and phenomena. The Christian-colonialisation systemically punished what it perceived as idolatry, what exists in Indigenous language use, referring to the world as animate. The Anindilyakwa artists refer to their dadikwakwa-kwa as they would to someone living; it brings care and intimacy to the dadikwakwa-kwa. The extension of the relationship to natural phenomena connects beyond static objects, into a companion-based awareness of the natural world.

When foraying into restitution, we encounter unexpected collisions with cultural revelations that emerge from exploring beyond objectifying repatriation. For Anindilyakwa people, songlines are an opera of knowledge believed to have brought the land into existence. Dadikwakwa-kwa comes with a songline, a dormant one. Discussions and the repatriation process leading up to ‘Tide of Returns’ became an aid to memory. As senior Anindilyakwa artist Stephanie Durilla worked on her dadikwakwa-kwa in her home, iambs from decades earlier began to ebb into the conscious corners of her husband’s mind. Elvis Bara, key songman, appropriately named. Elvis thinks back to the campfire decades earlier, where song, accompanied by didjeridoo and clapsticks, first penetrated his mind, and the song begins to link into its entirety once again. He eventually sings it in the country it belongs to; as the ladies collect shells along the tide lines, they begin to dance, breaking the barriers of memory, guided by the voice, as the surrounding country listens on. The use of lens and microphone etch the moment into digital keeping, this is healing, sung.

To finish the journey: a word often used in conjunction with dadikwakwa-kwa is eningilukwakwa; it means to move around, to be nomadic. The shells are nomadic by nature, beginning as clawed molluscs scuttling across ocean floors; they elope and float to beaches of campfires, where fish are speared, and medicines grow, songlines are created, and names and meanings are embedded in the land. They are collected in flotsam containers and taken to art-centre floors, where they become imbued with life, named, adopted, and acknowledged. Anindilyakwa artists are a moon to the tides that now move the dadikwakwa-kwa on their journey from sea to show-stopping exhibition. In ‘Tide of Returns’, Dadikwakwa-kwa and their stories are alive once again.

If repatriation, as the exhibition proposes, is not only about objects but about restoring relationships between people, land, and water, what kinds of futures does ‘Tide of Returns’ imagine for museums, and for the communities to whom these histories belong?

There are ways in which the future can be narrated radically, even if we know it cannot necessarily be enacted that way. So, for example, taking indigenous environmental care seriously envisages a future in which ocean destruction is reduced, if not reversed. That needs to go hand in hand with global policy change. That is what we envisage, and TBA–Academy is lobbying for it at the highest levels.

Pragmatically speaking, we know that working on specific islands and communities directly affects them and provides best-practice models that can be implemented elsewhere. So an organisation like AIATSIS uses the repatriation to Anindiliakwa to show that its ROCH program, which researched and funded the repatriation of Aboriginal culture/artefacts, is effective, enabling it to lobby the Australian government for more support.

The radical future I would envisage is liberation through repatriation – the museum sheds its imperial skins, the communities receive what they want and need to move forward with dignity.

The pragmatic future is differentiated analysis of individual items of value (provenance research) and the return of those items through careful, sustainable programs that build relations, not transactions.

In a moment when so much power is centrifugally imploding on the few, the heritage of minorities is abused and debased. This larger move is to repatriate, for want of a term that will encompass the protection and respect for the past within the vicious settler, separatist, dictatorial politics of today.

This exhibition is on view at Ocean Space in Chiesa di San Lorenzo, Venice, until 11 October 2026.