Portfolio

The hybrid exhibition and discursive project Inside Archives stems from a critical examination of Leni Riefenstahl’s “Nuba work” by students enrolled in the Art in Context Master’s programme at Berlin University of Arts (UdK). During her travels to the Nuba Mountains in Sudan in the 1960s and 1970s, Riefenstahl photographed and filmed local people and their culture.

Inside Archives showcases a variety of media — installations, video and photographic projects, and written and audio works — developed by the UdK students and artists from Sudan. The project has been conceived as a dynamic, participatory process involving research, interviews, discussions and artistic practice, framed as a dialogue between art, science and lived experiences.

Hailing from diverse global backgrounds, the exhibiting artists bring their own stories and perceptions to the project, seeking to reinterpret Riefenstahl’s images in order to subvert their power, expose their layers of meaning, and explore new forms of storytelling. Workshops, interventions, readings and other educational formats offer further insights into how museums approach Riefenstahl’s work. Through artistic perspectives, the project aims to create new narratives, strengthen networks and help visitors engage with the challenging subject matter of the Nuba photographs, situated between the idealised stereotypes of the past and critical vantage point of today.

Participating Artists

Abdalsalam Alhaj, Camilo Correa-Costa, hajooj kuka, Jihye Kim, Jule Roehr, Khalid Shatta, Kodikodi, Mauricio Candela, Pascale Espinosa, Patricio Trim, Sally Frey, Sara-Hiruth Zewde, Schokofeh Kamiz and Yasmin Balai

Curators

Inside Archives forms part of an artistic-academic seminar at the Institute for Art in Context at Berlin University of the Arts, led by Julia Grosse (Art in Context) and Katrin Peters-Klaphake (Deutsches Historisches Museum). The exhibition project is curated by Julia Grosse and Katrin Peters-Klaphake in collaboration with Ludger Derenthal (Kunstbibliothek [Art Library], Photography Collection).

Artist Statement

These paintings emerge from direct engagement with the archive of Leni Riefenstahl and the broader question of how the Nuba images were produced, circulated, and fixed over time. The archive is a process that reveals how seeing is constructed. What happens behind the image, how is it staged, what is exchanged, and how does it come to shape a dominant narrative? In the Nuba context, practices such as dance, body painting, and wrestling are ritual ways of connecting to land, community, and ancestors. They carry spiritual and cultural meaning. In the archive, they are reframed through an external gaze that isolates, aestheticizes, and transforms them into spectacle. What appears as documentation is shaped by power, expectation, and a mechanical way of seeing.

This work brings into tension these two systems: a ritual consciousness rooted in relation, and an image-making process that abstracts and controls. Through fragmentation, repetition, and shifting perspective, it interrupts the surface of the image and resists its authority. Figures do not fully reveal themselves; they remain layered, unstable, present on their own terms. A space opens where memory, presence, and self-representation can exist beyond imposed forms of visibility. The absence in the archive is not empty.

Examines how the divine is expressed through water, food, art, craft, music, and dance across cultures.

Grounded in Indigenous perspectives, including Shatta’s own heritage from the Nuba Mountains in Sudan, the project traces how spiritual expression is shaped by environment, ritual, and lived experience. It has been presented internationally.

The sensation of being out of place. We live in a time where many people feel a disconnection from their own bodies and existence.

I believe in trying to uncover the cultural heritage we lost under Islamic conquest and European colonialism.