Minna Henriksson & Sezgin Boynik, Iskra

Minna Henriksson is interested in looking at local specificities in regards underground activities against fascism that spread in Europe in the 1930s and 40s. Her aim is specifically to find out about the very small scale and local organisational networks and strategies of the resistance movements in the so-called Bessarabia-region of the ‘Greater Romania’, and how they connected to the bigger international networks.

Previously, Minna Henriksson has researched destinies of antifascist monuments in Iasi in a project and exhibition titled ‘Iasi X-Ray’. She has also previously worked with forms of antifascist resistance in the Finnish context, among other things by making gouache paintings of activities that were considered as treason at the time when Finland was allied with Germany. Such clandestine events lack a photo documentation, and exist only as passing mentions in people’s recollections and police reports. These events have been largely unaddressed in later history writing as well.

For the current research Minna Henriksson will first reach out to academicians who have studied and published about the history of underground resistance networks in the region in Romania and Moldova. One of the starting points is to draw parallels between Romania and Finland in their strive in the interwar period to expand their country borders to the east to reach an “ethnic nation state” along with “natural borders”. Another similarity between the two countries is that they both became sort of satellites to Germany in the WW2.

An interesting historical fact is that the newspaper Iskra, an organ of the early socialist movement in Russia at the start of the 20th Century, was written and edited in exile in various places in Europe, and for a while clandestinely printed in Chisinau (from October 1901 to March 1902). From there it was secretly distributed around Russia. A research into the impressive international networks of illegal publishing as a central form of antifascist resistance in the first half of the 20th Century will be conducted in collaboration with author and publisher Sezgin Boynik (Rab-Rab Press and Pyke-Presje).

(Research proposal, September 2025)

Minna Henriksson (b. 1976, Oulu, Finland, lives in Helsinki) is a visual artist working with a disparate range of tools including text, drawing, painting and linocut. She studied art in Brighton, Helsinki and Malmö. Henriksson’s work relates to leftist, anti-racist and feminist struggles. In dealing with historical cases, Henriksson hopes to politicise contemporary events that seem neutral and inevitable. The ideological nature of historiography is a recurring theme in her work. Henriksson has been active in various collectives, and often works collaboratively. She is member of leftist art workers’ association Kiila (The Wedge). In 2017 she was awarded the Anni and Heinrich Sussmann Artist Award, a Viennese foundation promoting artistic work committed to the ideal of democracy and antifascism. Her work has been shown widely in art context, as well as in institutions of history and science, among them in A Time In Pieces, Kyiv Perennial – The Berlin edition, 5th Kyiv Biennial, Between Bridges, Berlin, 2023; Self-Determination 1921-1923 – a Global Perspective, IMMA Museum of Modern Art Ireland, 2023; New Directions May Emerge, 2. Helsinki Biennial, 2023; Editorial Tables: Reciprocal Hospitalities, The Showroom, London, 2023; Mapping (Un)solidarity, A.M. Qattan Foundation, Ramallah, 2022; Little did they know, Guest Program of EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art 2020, Limerick, 2021; Actually, The Dead Are Not Dead, Third Bergen Assembly, Bergen, 2019; “We are not alone”: Legacies of Eugenics, the Wiener Holocaust Library, Oxford Brookes University, 2021; History Unfolds, Swedish History Museum, Stockholm, 2016–17.

Sezgin Boynik (b 1977, Prizren, Kosovo, lives in Helsinki) writer, editor and publisher of art related writings, expanding the publishing practice into the fields of exhibition making and experimental forms of organising. As a writer and editor, Boynik is engaged in various internationally active publishing projects and currently running Rab-Rab Press, an independent publishing platform on art and theory. Since 2014, when the Rab-Rab Press was founded, it has issued eight volumes of annual Rab-Rab: journal of political and formal inquiries in art, and over fourty books on contemporary theory, avant-garde art history, and experimental art projects. Rab-Rab’s editorial work and publications expose forgotten and marginalised histories and bring together the work of artists and leftist thinkers. Besides his engagement in Rab-Rab Press, Boynik is also a founding member of Pykë-Presje, a collective from Prizren Kosovo. Pykë-Presje works mainly with printed matter and runs an independent cultural space and bookshop. Pykë-Presje produces experimental radical publications, organises exhibitions, discursive programs and workshops. Most significantly, Pykë-Presje realised an installation and a publication commissioned by Manifesta 14, the European Nomadic Biennial for Contemporary Art in Pristina in 2022. As a member of the editorial board of OEI, a Stockholm based magazine for experimental poetry, critical investigations, speculative archeologies and counter-historiographies Sezgin Boynik edited an entire issue of OEI magazine in 2021, dedicated to the concrete and visual poetry produced in Yugoslavia. The publication was reviewed in Tuli ja Savu issue 1/2022. In 2022, this editorial work was translated into an installation, which was on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Slovenia in Ljubljana 22. 09. 2022 – 29. 01. 2023.

Contributions by: Charles Esche (NL), Djordje Balmajović (RS/SI), Andrei Morari (PMR/MD), Minna Henriksson & Sezgin Boynik (FI/RKS), Vitalie Sprînceană (MD), Cristina David (RO), Mick Wilson (IRL/SE), Stine Hebert (DK), Ioana Florea (RO), Maria Hlavajova (NL), Ghenadie Popescu (MD), Baran Caginli (TR/FI), Vladimir Us (MD), Maxim Polyakov (PMR/MD)

Co-organised by tranzit.ro/ iași in partnership with 1+1 Association and HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, associated initiative of the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary (CAPIm).

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