Inside Archives

During her travels to the Nuba Mountains in Sudan in the 1960s and 1970s, she photographed and filmed the people living there and their cultures.

“Inside Archives” features installations, video and photography projects, as well as text and audio formats created by the students, alongside works by Sudanese artists.

The project is conceived as a dynamic, participatory process involving research, interviews, discussions, and artistic practice—as a dialogue between art, scholarship, and lived encounter.

The exhibiting artists come from diverse global contexts, bring their own stories and perspectives, and aim to reinterpret Riefenstahl’s images: to break their power, uncover their layers of meaning, and experiment with new forms of storytelling.

Workshops, interventions, readings, and other educational formats open up further avenues for engagement, including how museums handle Riefenstahl’s works. The aim of the project is to create new contexts through artistic perspectives, deepen networks, and also to help visitors better understand the complex and difficult subject matter of the Nuba photographs in Riefenstahl’s work—navigating the gap between the stereotypical glorification of that era and the current situation.

Curatorial Team

“Inside Archives” is part of an artistic-scholarly seminar at the Institute for Art in Context at the Berlin University of the Arts, led by Julia Grosse (Art in Context) and Katrin Peters-Klaphake (German Historical Museum). The exhibition and program are curated by Julia Grosse and Katrin Peters-Klaphake in collaboration with Ludger Derenthal (Art Library, Photography Collection).

A special exhibition of the Berlin University of the Arts in cooperation with the Art Library – State Museums of Berlin