Postcards From the Edge of Hell : Sarajevo: Shells fall again, electricity falters and water trickles. Artists’ posters shrink and colors disappear.

The artists’ credo, in charming fractured English, sounds like a message in a bottle: “Because of completely siege of concentration camp called Sarajevo and because of no possibility of any communication with Outside World, we decided to print our postcards and in that way to reach The World. It would be our way of lifting a multiple blockade in which we are living.”

Dada and Bojan Hadzihalilovic, who designed this series of postcards called “Greetings from Sarajevo” are a typical Bosnian-blend household: Dada, 27, is a Muslim, her husband, Bojan, 29, is a Serbo-Jew. They still sign their work “Trio Sarajevo,” but work as a duo because their colleague from the Academy of Fine Arts, Leila Mulabegovic, left before the shelling started there in April, 1992.

They wanted to submit their work to the International Bienalle of Posters in Warsaw last spring, but lack of large-format paper reduced their posters to postcards and the siege kept them from leaving the town or sending the portfolio out. (They could travel, they say, if the Coca-Cola company would only sue them for copyright theft and extradite them to the United States.) Shortages of ink limit their palette to red and occasionally blue or green but they recall, without much modesty, Picasso’s blue period.

The most disturbing setback to their enterprise, however, is the enemy fire. Their apartment-studio is just a few blocks from the confrontation line, so first they moved the studio from the front room--too exposed to mortar and sniper fire--to the kitchen. They cooked in the bathroom. When electricity for their computer and laser printer became too erratic, they moved to an office of the former Olympic center, which as headquarters of the United Nations forces had a priority power supply. After the cease-fire in February, they returned to their apartment, which is back on the front line.

Dada and Bojan call the postcards a “nonprofit project.” To survive, they are art directors for several Sarajevo weeklies and they design identity cards and uniforms for the Bosnian army, the police and the railways in exchange for booze, cigarettes, sugar, feta cheese and peas.

Electricity is again working only intermittently and the shelling that stopped for half a year has returned. Water cuts are more and more frequent, wood for heating is difficult to come by and the food situation is catastrophic, with no airlift into Sarajevo for more than two weeks and no convoys, either.

Dada and Bojan live just one block from the presidency building in Sarajevo, where two anti-tank missiles landed last week while Yasushi Akashi, the U.N. special envoy, was inside. They hate it when high-ranking U.N. people are in town because it increases the intensity of Bosnian Serb shelling around their apartment. Bojan asked me to remember them on New Year’s Eve: It will be the 1,001st night of war in Sarajevo.