Paradoxus is the artistic name and creative brand of Mr. Dzanko (aka Dino).
From an early age, he was drawn to everything that carried emotion, rhythm, and image - acting in school plays, dancing, writing and reading poetry, playing basketball, and eventually discovering the guitar. In sixth grade, he began to play; by ninth grade, music became a passion. His musical beginnings trace back to Sarajevo in the early 2000s with the punk-rock band SHTELA, later followed by KAMIKAZA, an alternative funk-rock-jazzy band that became part of the city’s underground scene between 2005 and 2007.
While music was always present, Dino’s curiosity reached beyond sound - into movement, words, and the deeper layers of human experience. This curiosity led him to become the author and co-organizer of VENTIL, the first student festival of culture in Sarajevo (2008). Together with many fascinating and talented young people, he created a space where thousands of students, musicians, writers, and visual artists could connect through theatre, exhibitions, concerts, and poetry. It became a moment of awakening for a generation, revealing hidden artists and voices that had long waited to be seen.
Realizing that living solely from art wasn’t yet possible, he followed another calling -the study of the mind. He earned two master’s degrees in Psychology and Behavior Analysis, and is now completing his PhD, exploring how people feel, learn, and change.
But art never left. Since 2007, he has worked with film and photography - first through video work and weddings, later turning his lens toward portraits, stories, and street photography. Today, he continues to explore photography as a way of observing what usually passes unnoticed - the quiet intersections of light, thought, and emotion. He is particularly drawn to reflections, shadows, and subtle transitions of light, where the visible and invisible briefly meet. His recent work often explores the dialogue between stillness and movement, presence and absence. In addition to his personal projects, he also creates artistic portraits and visual stories for musicians and other artists, seeking to translate sound and feeling into image - to capture not just how something looks, but how it feels.
Through all these paths - artistic and academic - runs a single thread: a lifelong search for balance. Dino has always lived within opposites - between reason and intuition, control and surrender, light and shadow - seeking the point where they meet and reveal something true. After years in professional and academic work, he returns to the scene under the name Paradoxus - a space where sound, image, and thought merge into one current. A place shaped by contrasts, where every contradiction finds rhythm.
Through music, photography, and motion, Paradoxus searches for what doesn’t fit - fragments that interrupt, that ask you to look again, to listen differently, to feel without naming. Every sound, image, and word carries a pulse - sometimes quiet, sometimes raw, always alive. I have lived my whole life in paradoxes and I keep searching for the spaces where opposites meet. If you are searching too, if something in this resonates, reach out. Not to define, but to explore. Let’s create together.
Is something beautiful or ugly? Real or illusion? Comforting or unsettling?
Here, it can be both - because truth lives in the tension between opposites.