Design group Trio Sarajevo (husband and wife Bojan and Dalida (Durakovic) Hadzihalilovic and collaborator Leila Mulabegovic Hatt), formed in 1985, was part of the Sarajevo generation that was raised on the punk culture and pop-art movements. Trio Sarajevo opted to remain in Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia, continuing to earn a living as commercial designers. Note at the bottom of each postcard: “This document has been created in war circumstances. (No paper, no inks, no electricity, no water. Just good will.).”

The three met at the Sarajevo Academy of Fine Arts in 1985. By the time they graduated in 1989, their pop art- and punk-influenced work had gained the attention of a national and global audience. They reworked the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover for the Bosnian rock group Plavi Orkestar (Blue Orchestra). That same year, TRIO won a coveted Saatchi & Saatchi award for their TV and advertising work and formed a marketing agency called Fabrika.

TRIO had opportunities to work abroad when war broke out in 1992, but they decided to stay in order to inform the outside world about the shelling and siege in their beloved capital city. The design group diligently produced postcards and posters while confined in the city for the next four years.

The group used (and reworked) images familiar to citizens throughout the world to capture their attention and demonstrate their common culture and humanity. Some postcard messages are funny (“Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sarajevo”), while many are more serious and sinister: the Olympic rings made from barbed wire; Superman’s shield being pummeled by bullets; Sarajevo’s version of Warhol’s soup cans with bullet holes; a standard New Year’s card with fireworks also features a bomb dropping. Some images are an appeal to their own people. In a riff on an Absolut Vodka advertisement, TRIO replaced the contents of the vodka with the contents and aspirations for Bosnian unity on the label. Some postcards are an appeal for help from the outside world. Trio used recruitment posters from world wars to rally the global community: “Wake up Europe! Sarajevo Calls…” Uncle Sam commands, “I Want You to Save Sarajevo.” A number of Olympic Games images are dated 1994 instead of the actual date of the Winter Games (1984). TRIO may have been pleading, “World, we captured your attention a decade ago, why not now in our time of need?”

In a time before widespread news websites and social media reported injustices and atrocities in real time, TRIO chose to create postcards, a medium meant to document of travels mailed home to family and friends.In an introduction to the poster exhibit, “Greetings from Sarajevo 1993,” Aleksandar Hemon reflected on their message to those beyond the borders of the siege: “They re-designed images, re-branded brands, re-configured the outside reality, creating their postcards to send them to the world in order to show that Sarajevo never left it. It was the world that left Sarajevo” (Gallery 11/07/95). Indeed, TRIO revised Pink Floyd's famous album cover for The Wall, crossing out “Berlin” and scrawling “Sarajevo” in its place; walls bolstered by politics, misunderstandings, and ethnic strife separated Bosnians from each other and from the global community that looked on.

TRIO Sarajevo’s work has been exhibited worldwide and published in books, newspapers, and magazines, including Life, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Art Press, and Creative Review. The award-winning Fabrika is now one of the largest multimedia creative, digital, and advertising agencies in Bosnia & Herzegovina.

The TRIO Sarajevo Collection features four original postcards and one 20-card compliation image.