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Jan Kempenaers – Spomenik

18 November 2007 until 20 January 2008

Jan Kempenaers showed photos of monuments in former Yugoslavia in the Braem Pavilion in Middelheim Museum.

The monuments which Jan Kempenaers recently visited and photographed in former Yugoslavia are generally considered ideological structures, which rarely are the subject of an immediate aesthetic experience.

It seems like the lack of an (official) manifestation of the collective memory, something which was often achieved with overwhelming pathos in the past, still makes it impossible today to show any real interest in these monuments or to experience them as artworks. The screen of the social context conceals their aesthetic content, which nowadays lacks the bold ideological rhetoric of yesteryear.

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