Jan Kempenaers: 'Memorials'

Jan Kempenaers (1968, Heist-op-den-Berg) lives in Antwerp and works in Ghent, where he teaches as an artist at KASK (Ghent University College). Since the 1980s, he has been photographing urban and natural landscapes, architecture, and monuments. Hamza Halloubi (1982, Morocco) is an artist, filmmaker, and writer, born in Tangier and based in Brussels. He works with film, video, and painting. He develops a body of work that questions dominant artistic narratives and the tensions between visibility and silence. His oeuvre is part of an approach that seeks to decentralize Western modern and contemporary narratives. Rejecting the spectacular, he favours subtle gestures. He conceives the act of filming as an ambiguous gesture-both powerful and vulnerable-often imbued with shame or doubt, and he refuses any form of identity essentialization.

In March 2026, Memorials (ROMA 510) was published by Roma Publications. Memorials builds on Jan Kempenaers’ earlier publication Spomenik, which was released in 2010, along with the accompanying exhibition at Be-Part, Recent Ruins. Memorials brings together images of Brutalist war memorials in the former Yugoslavia, built between 1950 and 1980, during the socialist era. The photographs were taken during ten trips through the region—through present-day Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia—and offer a glimpse of a landscape in which sculpture, ideology, and collective memory remain closely intertwined. In 2022, Jan Kempenaers held his second exhibition at Be-Part, titled Colonial Monuments in Belgium. In conjunction with this exhibition, Roma Publications released the book Jan Kempenaers, Belgian Colonial Monuments 2. The first volume of Belgian Colonial Monuments was published in 2019.

Image: Jan Kempenaers, Beograd #1, 2022