In 1993 the siege of Sarajevo was in full swing. The front lines tore our family apart. My father, a professional policeman and senior officer of the Antiterrorist Unit of the Ministry of Interior of the then-Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, was continuously deployed. My mother’s family was trapped in the besieged enclaves of Eastern Bosnia.
In the pre-internet era communication was intermittent and scarce at best – occasional handwritten letters carried by the International Committee of the Red Cross or scratchy ham-radio conversations when conditions allowed. My mother, sister and I spent a brief period as refugees in Italy before returning to the blockaded city. The Bosnian government had by then dug the now-famous tunnel under Sarajevo airport, a narrow passage carved by hand to relieve the pressure of the siege on civilians and defence forces.
One of the letters we received contained a set of postcards from the city. The first one I saw was a redesigned ‘Enjoy Coca-Cola’ advertisement. The designers had replaced the brand name with the word ‘Sarajevo’, maintaining the same iconic red-and-white palette and font. I was barely 13 and could not grasp the concept of redesign as an artistic statement. Yet, raised on a cunning mix of Western pop culture and socialist values, and having learned English primarily from MTV, I instantly recognised the imagery: the Hollywood sign, Marilyn Monroe, Uncle Sam, Superman, Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans.
The effect was visceral. These postcards were more than creative exercises. Being a refugee means being uprooted and often dehumanised. These images helped me reconnect with the European – and broader global – identity I always identified with. Suddenly I felt like a citizen of the world again.
The authors were TRIO, a Sarajevo-based design duo. Dalida and Bojan Hadžihalilović graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo in 1989. Before the war they worked in graphic design, visual communication, animation, television commercials and publishing, winning numerous awards. When the siege began they used mixed media to handcraft a series of posters that became the Postcards from Sarajevo– a cultural testimony sent out from the city under siege.
As Bosnian American writer Aleksandar Hemon observed:
People inside didn’t just suffer and die. They also lived, thought, loved, played music, and strived to restore the city to 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 centre. The TRIO design team accepted the challenge in an extraordinary way. They redesigned images, rebranded brands, reconfigured the outside reality, creating their postcards to show that Sarajevo had never left the world. It was the world that left Sarajevo.1
While TRIO addressed the outside world, their work resonated deeply with a teenage Sarajevan refugee in Italy.
Almost 30 years later, in Doha, I met Palestinian artist and photojournalist Belal Khaled, a calligrapher turned war photographer. A year had passed since the latest iteration of the Israeli onslaught on Gaza began. I had already become familiar with Belal’s imagery before meeting him. Putting a face to the work always provides invaluable context.
As we browsed thousands of photographs – depicting extremely graphic scenes of destruction and violence inflicted on civilians – I noticed images of Belal painting graffiti on the rubble of Gaza, unexploded ordnance and the remaining walls still standing amid the destruction. It was as though he had repurposed these ruins, transforming them into canvases to draw and write upon. Once again I felt the same unnamable gut sensation that I had felt in 1993.
The language barrier was different this time: Belal’s writing was almost entirely in Arabic, which I did not speak. Yet the barrier was irrelevant; it was transcended by a stark contrast between Belal’s precise, impeccable, pristine calligraphy and the chaos of utter destruction, as if Belal’s writing was putting the shattered world in order. Sitting across from someone with whom I share the experience of being a refugee – a person able to transform the wreckage of war into messages of resilience and beauty – brought a rare moment of recognition.
Belal found the strength to create and craft beauty as an act of defiance in the rare breaks between photographing bodies torn apart by bombardment and dodging new attacks.
It did not matter that I could not decipher his calligraphy. His perfect strokes on broken walls and twisted metal transported me back to Sarajevo. Everything changed once I understood that the writing on the collapsed roof of the bombed house says ‘Journalism is not a crime’ and on the remains of the bomb Belal quoted Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim’s words:
Our old men and children die,
Yet never surrender.
A mother collapses over the bodies of her slain sons,
yet never surrenders.
I was again a teenage refugee boy holding TRIO’s postcards, feeling like a citizen of a broken world once more.
Belal Khaled
As an artist and refugee who grew up in the Khan Younis refugee camp, I was shaped by the walls around me, walls covered with graffiti that defied occupation and carried messages of hope, resistance and the right of return. Those early images planted a deep love for art within me, one that later became my way of resisting and rebuilding life from under the rubble.
In Gaza, a land known throughout history for enduring wars, I found inspiration in destruction itself. The ruins, the grey surfaces and the silence after bombings became my canvas. I painted on broken walls, on the remains of rockets, on prosthetic limbs and even on aid cartons. Each surface carried its own story; each stroke was a small act of defiance and rebirth. Children often joined me in these creative acts, turning pain into participation as a form of psychological relief; it was also a way for them to reclaim fragments of joy amid chaos.
Design under siege is not just about aesthetics; it is about survival, innovation and the human will to create beauty in the darkest of times. In the end our art becomes our testimony, proof that the spirit of creation cannot be bombed, even when everything else has been destroyed.
