The exhibition builds on the growing international movement advocating for the repatriation of art taken by colonial powers and subsequently stored in Europe’s museums. Indigenous communities in Australia, Namibia, and many other places around the world continue to lobby for the return of their cultural objects.
Groote Eylandt, From My Mother’s Country (production still), 2025. Photo: Britten Andrews.
Two recent examples testify to the power of repatriations to the community:
- in 2022, the Ethnological Museum in Berlin returned 23 objects—selected by Namibian experts—plundered in part during the era of German colonization at the turn of the 20th century.
- in September 2023, the Manchester Museum returned 174 cultural heritage items, including a large collection of Dadikwakwa-kwa (shell dolls), to the Warnindilyakwa in Australia. Tide of Returns presents some of these old Dadikwakwa-kwa from Manchester at Ocean Space, and they are joined by a new community of thousands, made especially for the exhibition.
Tide of Returns emerges from the many small rituals that comprise artists’ ecological wisdom and care. By engaging with Indigenous cosmovisions and the shaping power of water, the artworks on view explore the potential for overcoming forms of cultural, social, and environmental violence.
Thes exhibition is a ceremonial act of reclamation; a form of homecoming that moves beyond activism, searching for a profound form of resistance. It speaks with a gentleness, an unfolding, poetic articulation of cultural survival. The stories told here are shaped by the language of the land, the ocean, and the bodies that tell them.
By using materials washed ashore, from nets to shells, these artists show new ways for living and working in the aftermath of colonial rule and extractive economies.
