Jan Kempenaers – Memorials

Jan Kempenaers (BE, 1968), has photographed urban and natural landscapes since the mid-1980s. Between 2016 and 2025, he documented these brutalist war monuments of socialist Yugoslavia. Initially capturing large ‘Spomeniks’ over twenty years ago, his early work highlighted their futuristic forms amidst historical ambiguity. Recently, Kempenaers returned to photograph countless smaller, local memorials across Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Slovenia. Often nondescript, locating these scattered sites became integral to the project. His evolving focus shifts from monumental icons to humble markers, revealing how memory persists in everyday landscapes throughout the former Yugoslavia’s diverse terrain.