Venice 5069 30122
Italy
During the opening week of the Venice Biennale 2026, TBA21–Academy’s Ocean Space brings to life the Tide of Returns, its 2026 exhibition based on the artistic research of the Repatriates Collective, initiated by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, through four days of gathered bodies, voices, waters, and unfinished histories.
Throughout the week, German-Bolivian artist, researcher, curator, and educator Verena Melgarejo Weinandt activates her installation through a recurring performance, Braiding Connections—a gesture that moves across the site, weaving the waters around San Lorenzo into relation. As the braid travels from canal to canal and weaves audiences into relation with one another, it creates a repetition that is not incidental; the performance establishes the rhythm beneath the week's more discursive moments, insisting that kinship with water, and with each other, is not performed once but sustained.
Expanding the exhibition’s themes of cultural resistance, the week’s conversations and presentations bring forth perspectives on collective imaginaries and colonial erasure, including the presentations of two books on Thursday, May 7, that refuse to let dominant narratives stand, Legacy Russell’s Black Meme (wetlands, 2025) is an exploration of digital decolonization, demonstrating how the representation of Blackness has shaped contemporary visual culture, as, without the "Black Meme," the digital as we know it would not exist. In the afternoon, editor Skye Arundhati Thomas presents Palestine is everywhere, TBA21's contributor-led anthology of testimony, poetry, essays, and artworks from Gaza and beyond, joined by Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a surgeon operating on the frontlines in Gaza, and now Beirut, since the start of the genocide in 2023, and Lawrence Abu Hamdan of Earshot.ngo, the sonic investigation agency confronting corporate and state injustice. Together, they will consider how, in this time of unending war, to better listen to genocide, exploring what it means to witness when memory is under attack, and how this is both accountability and resistance.
On Friday, May 8, deepening the insights into the exhibition, an artist talk between Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, moderated by Mark Rappolt, Editor-in-Chief of ArtReview, will be followed by the second part of the symposium Between Tides: Gatherings on Return, curated by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Wietske Maas and featuring artist Samson Ogiamien and curator Rasha Salti, among others. This program opens up critical perspectives on restitution and cultural circulation, exploring repatriation not as a bureaucratic process but as a living, ceremonial, and polyphonic practice. Bringing these ideas into resonance with the Venice Biennale's In Minor Keys, the gathering seeks reverberations between the Biennale’s attunement to minor keys and the slow, unfinished work of return.
That same afternoon, the program will feature a presentation on the seventh Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2027), offering insights into the biennale’s thematic focus and its role in fostering global artistic dialogue as one of the world’s most consequential sites of South-South artistic exchange.
The week closes on Saturday, May 9, with Sonic Returns, an evening of music and performance, leaving Ocean Space resonating as a place where ideas of return are heard, felt, and collectively enacted. Moving fluidly across genres and disciplines, this program brings together a diverse range of practices—from a ritualistic action by Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, a performance by Sofia Pozdniakova, Gabriele Tai, and Giacomo Salis in collaboration with Cosmogram, to an eclectic, free-form DJ set by the artist Diana Policarpo, and the hyperkinetic, multilingual rap over forward-facing beats of MC Yallah & Debmaster.
Running in parallel throughout the week, the Research Room hosts Nature Speaks. Listening for Rights of Nature in Venice and Europe: a policy lab curated by Pietro Consolandi and Amalia Rossi, co-produced with the NICHE Centre for Environmental Humanities at Ca' Foscari University of Venice and developed with activist networks IDRA and the Confluence of European Water Bodies—engaging local communities and international publics around a new political horizon: the legal representation of the Venice lagoon.
From the Canal to the Lagoon, from the image to the territory, from the archive to the living body, this year Ocean Space resonates more than ever as a place where return itself remains unfinished, open, and collective.
Program
Wednesday, May 6
5–5:30pm: Braiding Connections—performance by Verena Melgarejo Weinandt.
Thursday, May 7
11:30am–1pm: Presentation of the book Black Meme. Decolonizzare il digitale with author Legacy Russell, TBA21 Co-Director Markus Reymann, and Alice Ongaro Sartori, an independent researcher and wetlands communication manager. In collaboration with wetlands books.
3–4:30pm: Presentation of the TBA21 publication Palestine is everywhere with editor Skye Arundhati Thomas, artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan of Earshot.ngo, and surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah.
5–5.30pm: Braiding Connections—performance by Verena Melgarejo Weinandt.
Friday, May 8
10am–1pm: Between Tides: Gatherings on Return—Art talk, moderated by Mark Rappolt (Editor-in-Chief of ArtReview), followed by conversations. Contributors include Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll (artist and historian), Wietske Maas (curator and researcher), Samson Ogiamien (artist), Markus Reymann (co-director, TBA21), Rasha Salti (curator Berlin and Beirut, curatorial advisor In Minor Keys), Jesse Weaver Shipley (John D. Willard Professor of African and African American Studies and Oratory, Dartmouth/filmmaker and anthropologist, New York), Verena Melgarejo Weinandt (artist and researcher), Christopher Williams-Wynn (art historian), among others. Electric Mobility Partner: Repower. Registrations here.
3–4:30pm: Presentation of the seventh Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2027)
5–5:30pm: Braiding Connections—performance by Verena Melgarejo Weinandt.
Saturday, May 9, 2026
6–9pm: Sonic Returns—performances, listening sessions, and DJ sets featuring Diana Policarpo, Sofia Pozdniakova, Giacomo Salis, Gabriele Tai, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, and MC Yallah & Debmaster.
Technical Sponsors of the event: Select Aperitivo and Perlage.
Strategic Media Partner of the Biennale Week Program: ArtReview.
