In her work, Minna Henriksson (1976, Oulu, Finland) explores themes such as nationalism, racism, economy, the erased history of the leftist struggle, politics in art, and so forth. In this project, she turns to socio-political relationships that are geographically and historically linked to relations between Finland and the Republic of South Africa during the period of apartheid. Works on paper casts light on the historical role of raw materials and companies engaged in their production and transport. Paper was Finland’s main export item and covered more than one half of the importing country’s material for the daily press in the period under discussion. One of the strongest and most influential silent weapons for the dissemination of ideas and indoctrination, it was also used as a means of identification with the leading authoritarian ideology and consequently of maintaining the apartheid. In her linocuts the artist can on the relief surface—spanning the image and word, by containing drawings, logos, and extracts from documents—establish a specific historical experience and show the exporting country’s bipolarity, which continued even after transport trade unions and paper industry workers terminated their cooperation with the Republic of South Africa (1985), all until 1987, when Finland finally imposed embargo that lasted for four years. 

The research work of Sezgin Boynik (1977, Prizren, Kosovo) often refers to the relationship between aesthetics and politics, cultural nationalism, Yugoslav cinematography, and punk. In the project Theses on hardcore, he offers a consideration of hardcore. In addition to its musical foundation, the latter marks the ethical stance or form of expression that negates being placed in a specific culture, where the notion of culture is also deemed to encompass the economic, social and ideological system (with the purpose of attaining political goals of the nation’s ruling elite). Hardcore contains elements of difference and novelty; it questions the declared norms and creates an autonomous territory that is becoming the main criterion of identity. The above stated may be complemented by Plato’s thought: “For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperilling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.” In place, Boynik artfully manoeuvres various elements of set-up, be it his own theses, abstracts of philosophical treatises, or extracted and abstracted backdrops of reproduced photos. The latter, symptomatically related to the urban environment in which punk bands are active, also allude to the wall as a means of physical delimitation or, rather, separation, which is again what the word apartheid stands for.