This project was developed as part of „Inside Archives“, a critical intervention in the photographic archive of Leni Riefenstahl’s ‚Nuba Work‘ (hereafter L.R.). It grew out of a collaboration between the Museum of Photography, Berlin and the Institute for Art in Context at the Universität der Künste Berlin. This collaboration, in turn, forms part of the efforts of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation) to reinterpret these photographs together with representatives of the Nuba community, through the project „Reclaiming Nuba Images“. In this particular strand of the project, artists/students from Julia Grosse’s class were given access to the archive’s contents and developed works in response to the experience. The results are heterogeneous, ranging from muteness to performance, from the essay to video art, and from sound art to historical photography. They were exhibited at the Museum of Photography, Berlin in May–June 2026.
The work titled ‘The Mills of Justice grind slowly…’ is a hypothetical trial of L.R. conducted with forensic determination. Its three photographs were named ‘Visual riddles around primitivist bias’ and its essay ‘The lady’s photos, or: The mills of justice grind slowly…’.
The essay is part of the exhibition’s publication and can be read here: Publication