Memorials continues the trajectory of Jan Kempenaers’ earlier publication Spomenik (ROMA 141, 2010). Comprising 255 black-and-white photographs, most of them made between 2022 and 2025, the book brings together images of brutalist war memorials in the former Yugoslavia, built between 1950 and 1980, during the socialist period. Made over the course of ten journeys through the region—across present-day Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia—the photographs trace a landscape in which sculpture, ideology, and collective memory remain deeply intertwined. As Matthew Harvey writes in his essay for the book, “the entire landscape of monuments acts as a library and archive in and of itself.”
Jan Kempenaers (BE, 1968) lives and works in Antwerp. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent and at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht.
Design: Roger Willems
