Today, at Gallery 11/07/95, the exhibition of posters “Greetings from Sarajevo 1993” was opened, featuring works created during the siege of Sarajevo. The authors of the posters, TRIO DESIGN SARAJEVO, an artistic group founded by Bojan Hadžihalilović, Dalida Hadžihalilović, and Lejla Mulabegović Hatt, former students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo, initially created a series of postcards during the war. Using motifs from popular culture, they sought to send a message about what was happening in Sarajevo. The postcards were later transformed into posters, which were first exhibited in 1994 at Collegium Artisticum.
Dalida and Bojan Hadžihalilović graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Department of Graphic Design, in Sarajevo in 1989. At the beginning of their studies, together with Lejla Mulabegović Hatt (who currently lives and works in Zurich), they founded the studio Design Trio – Sarajevo. Before the war in Yugoslavia, they were engaged in graphic design, visual communication, computer graphics, animation, TV production of TV commercials, books, magazines, newspapers, receiving many awards for their creative work. In the besieged Sarajevo, TRIO continued its artistic work, which resulted in a capital collection of posters and postcards showing redesigned symbols of pop culture of the 20th century, presented from the brutal war perspective.
In the introduction text of the exhibition catalogue, Aleksandar Hemon wrote:
“But people inside didn’t just suffer and die. They also lived, thought, loved, played music, and strived to restore the city into its righteous place in the world, the world that abandoned it so frivolously. For them, the challenge was how to bridge the two realities, how to reconnect what should’ve never been split apart, how to make the world face the fact that Sarajevo was actually at its center. The Trio design team accepted the challenge in their extraordinary way. 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”
