BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
Zuhanean Haneanzu is a collective of four interdisciplinary artists from Bosnia and Herzegovina: Anel Lepić, Husein Ohran, Muhamed Bešlagić, and Jasmin Zubić.
Today, we look at a collective that celebrates the act of spontaneous co-creation in an art world that often rewards fixed narratives and singular signatures. With only 11 followers on their Instagram page, you may not have heard of them, but they are like so many artists around the world who produce work because the creative spirit insists. ZUHANEAN HANEANZU treats authorship as a negotiated, collective condition—and turns the friction of togetherness into the content. The result feels less like finished statements and more like documents of collaboration: four voices choosing, again and again, to speak as one without pretending they’re identical.
To examine the pieces posted collectively, one can see a psychologically charged drawing and mixed-media practice that draws from Art Brut and outsider traditions, while touching on neo-expressionist figuration and collage. Flattened space, fractured faces, handwritten notes, and hybrid figures create a diaristic, interior language rather than an academic one, placing the work within a broader Balkan tradition of intimate, small-scale psychological drawing. Bold, unpolished color and occasional photographic insertions add a note of absurdity, and together the pieces read as a studio-based exploration built on a deliberately raw visual grammar.
Our special guest editor and essayist Ilhana Babić-Lepić, gives an insider view of the quartet, who interplay musical excursions with visual ones to achieve their own kind of harmony.
The Chaos of Cohesion:
The Radical Simultaneity of Bosnia’s ZUHANEAN HANEANZU
By Ilhana Babić-Lepić
The art world still leans heavily on the idea of the singular voice. We’re taught to look for the hand that leads, the style that repeats, the author who anchors meaning. But sometimes a work asks a different question: what happens when authorship is shared so fully that it begins to blur?
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, a landscape where history is often shaped by rigid, competing narratives, four interdisciplinary artists — Anel Lepić, Muhamed Bešlagić, Husein Ohran and Jasmin Zubić — work under the collective name ZUHANEAN HANEANZU. Their practice moves between painting and improvised music, but what binds both is a simple, radical premise: they begin together. No sketches passed around, no hierarchy settling the surface, just four people entering the same moment at once.
You can feel that simultaneity immediately in the paintings.
They don’t unfold like carefully plotted compositions. They gather. Layers of drawing and color sit beside one another the way overlapping conversations do in a crowded room. In works like Psihokariran or Ramazanska Zebnja 1446, the surface holds a kind of lived time, marks arriving quickly, some tentative, others insistent, none fully erased.
The eye keeps moving because nothing resolves too soon. A thin, deliberate line might drift into a loose wash of color, and a small figurative detail surfaces only to be partially covered, as if memory itself passed over it. In pieces like Savatré and Comment S’appelle Tu?, structure flickers in and out of focus. The paintings feel less finished than paused, held in a state where tension is still breathing.
Faces appear often, but they rarely settle into portraits. In Family Portrait and Mir Žrtav, human forms hover between presence and distortion. Features shift, overlap, and blur at the edges. They feel familiar in the way dreams do, recognizable but never fully stable. The result is quietly disarming. You’re not looking at identity as a fixed point, but as something shared, porous, still forming.
There’s a rawness running through these works, and it doesn’t feel accidental. Some passages carry a childlike openness, lines drawn with unguarded immediacy. Others hold heavier emotional weight, dense with reworking. The collective doesn’t smooth those differences out. They leave the seams visible. You sense not just the image, but the moment it was made.
That same openness carries into their musical practice as HANEANZU. The setup is simple: instruments gathered in a room, guitar, bass, ukulele, drums, saxophone, and no clear leader. They begin by listening. A rhythm might surface and linger, or dissolve almost as quickly as it arrives. A melody bends as another player leans into it, reshaping the air in real time.
The music moves like weather, shifting, responsive, never quite repeating itself. You can hear fragments of different traditions pass through, but nothing settles long enough to harden into genre. Each session feels singular, shaped by proximity and attention rather than plan. What remains afterward are traces, like footprints in soft ground, pointing back to a moment that can’t be reconstructed.
Across both painting and sound, the collective returns to the same quiet proposition: what if meaning doesn’t need a single center? ZUHANEAN HANEANZU doesn’t erase individuality, but it loosens its grip. Each gesture holds its own weight while leaning into the others. The work breathes through that shared balance.
There’s tenderness in that choice. In a culture that rewards clarity and ownership, letting authorship remain open carries a certain vulnerability. The results are less predictable, sometimes uneven, but they feel alive in a way tightly controlled works often don’t.
Collective processes always carry risk. They can drift toward excess, or blur into anonymity. What makes ZUHANEAN HANEANZU compelling is their willingness to stay close to that edge without retreating. The works don’t collapse into chaos, and they don’t resolve into neat order. They remain suspended somewhere in between.
And in that suspended space, something begins to take shape. Not a single voice, but a layered one. Not agreement, but nearness. The brilliance of ZUHANEAN HANEANZU lies in their refusal to tidy the seams. They leave us inside the vibration of the process itself, where the image is never a destination, but a living record of four voices choosing, again and again, to speak as one.
