Thousands of shell dolls scattered across ochre dunes brought from Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria greet visitors entering the deconsecrated Church of San Lorenzo in Venice. The installation, "From My Mother's Country" (2026) by the Repatriates Collective, anchors Tide of Returns, an exhibition on view at TBA21's Ocean Space through October 11.

The show examines the movement of cultural objects between Europe, Africa, and Australia at a moment when restitution has moved from demand to practice. Curated by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Tide of Returns unfolds across film, archival material, sculpture, and sound.

The backdrop is well documented. In November 2018, scholars Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy released The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics, a landmark report calling for the return of African artworks and artifacts removed during the colonial era. The authors argued that restitution was more than a question of legal ownership: it could repair historical injustice, restore cultural memory, and establish a new relationship between Europe and Africa based on reciprocity rather than colonial domination.

The report gave new momentum to restitution demands, which have involved not only celebrated treasures such as the Benin Bronzes but also more modest objects. In 2023, the Manchester Museum returned 174 such objects to the Anindilyakwa people of Groote Eylandt, a community of Indigenous Australian islanders.

These objects, called Dadikwakwa-kwa, are small dolls made from shells, fibers, textiles, beads, and found materials. They were traditionally used to teach children about kinship, clan relationships, fertility, and connections to the land. Many have individual names. The community understands them as living presences that preserve stories and ancestral knowledge.

In celebration of the return, the Repatriates Collective — a group of artists and researchers from Australia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe that investigates the histories and futures of returned objects — conceived Tide of Returns.

The dolls' 2026 Venice installation is accompanied by a film by von Zinnenburg Carroll, made with Kasimir Burgess, Britten Andrews, Noeleen Lalara, and Rebekah Wilson. In it, Anindilyakwa women re-dress the dolls and engage in rituals of "reanimating" them in preparation for their journey to Venice. Shimmering scenes of these preparations unfold alongside the multitude of dolls scattered across the undulating landscape.

Spread across the dunes like a Lilliputian society, the shell dolls suggest a world in which cultural continuity survives distance, displacement, and colonial violence. The symbolism is direct: objects removed from their communities are imagined returning to a landscape where social and ancestral ties remain intact. The dolls function less as individual protagonists than as illustrations of the exhibition's broader argument about return.

A second installation occupies its own wing of the church. "Weaving Connections" (2026), by the German-Bolivian artist Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, features textiles richly saturated in shades of blue — inspired, the artist says, by the continuous cycles of water — alongside an enormous black fabric braid unfurling across the floor and a three-channel video.

The braid serves as a synecdoche for Bolivian Indigenous womanhood. The video depicts female performers engaged in silent rituals, such as washing cloth braids in the waters of the Danube. In the exhibition catalog, Melgarejo Weinandt explains that the work stems from her research into German fantasies and stereotypes surrounding Indigenous peoples. Yet the installation raises an enduring question: how does one visualize stereotypes without, at least in part, relying on the very imagery one seeks to interrogate?

Some of Tide of Returns's arguments are well-worn, but the exhibition still makes restitution seem less an endpoint than a point of departure for harder questions about who gets to possess, represent, and remember. As repatriation efforts accelerate on both sides of the equation — from the Benin Bronzes to the Dadikwakwa-kwa — those questions will only grow harder to defer.

Tide of Returns continues at Ocean Space, Chiesa di San Lorenzo, Venice, through October 11. The exhibition was organized by TBA21–Academy and is curated by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll.