They have been sitting in various boxes in various closets for close to a decade—a collection of twenty-two postcards that I bought in a makeshift post exchange near the Sarajevo airport while I was serving as part of IFOR (the NATO-commanded Dayton Peace Accords implementation forces).
Created and printed under wartime conditions by a group of artists who called themselves TRIO Sarajevo, these postcards re-imagined images from advertisements and Western pop-culture with the goal of raising awareness of the plight of besieged Sarajevans.
I regret that I do not have the entire series; there are at least thirty-six of them. The ones I do have, though, are quite visually striking. I have been wanting to mount them for some time, and finally summoned the motivation a few weeks ago. It cost me about $200 worth of supplies and about eight hours to arrange (and rearrange) the irregularly-sized cards. The custom-sized frame, glass, and gray matte are from Michaels Arts and Crafts.
I did not originally intend for this to be a double matte, but my initial dimensional calculations were a bit off. Of course, there are no mistakes in art—the universe just takes art in unexpected directions every so often. I bevel-cut a white matte to size this evening and placed it under the gray one, and I quite like the way it looks now.
FYI, a Google search revealed a few more links about the TRIO Sarajevo postcards.
I love the postcards, it looks great! I wish I kept some from all my trips, but I never have. There are other things I collect everywhere I go, but for some reason not postcards. I do, however, send postcards from every city I visit to a coworker of mine, so at least one of us has them.
I’m not normally one to collect postcards either, but there was something so striking, so historically significant about this assortment, I couldn’t resist buying them.
These postcards were all designed by my godmother and godfather during the war. When they had nothing else they had creativity which is a strong charcter trait of Bosnians. They are all amazing if you see all the postcards together at the same time.
These postcards are a purchase that I will treasure always. They hang in my living room, so I see them almost every night.