Aliens at home

 

Will this be the fate of the former Yugoslavia’s giants portrayed by Jan Kempenaers? A sort of extraterrestrial fleet of spaceships ran out of fuel in the barren landscape of the Balkans. Monuments rendered mute and silent by time, they lie misunderstood as huge icons of a glorious and highly ideological past. The imprint of melancholy of these beautiful and mysterious sculptures, given by the Belgian photographer, is a mirror of the indifference or even the contempt that surrounds them. Kempenaers respects, with his work, the modern and abstract nature of these memorials and their bloody meaning, by photographing them in a very objective way, almost documentaristic, enhancing shapes, sizes, and their tones in contrast with the nearby nature, which appears as something more than an environment, or a context. Dry representations, that strike us because of the feeling of alienation and displacement that they transmit. A vague sense of ambiguity cross this catalog of curios as much as unusual forms. Perhaps for this reason we should not forget them or ignore their history.

 

 

Photo:

© Courtesy of Jan Kempenaers. Proposed by Outlandish Photography. Jan Kempenaers is an affiliated artist / researcher at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, University College Ghent (jan.kempenaers@hogent.be).

www.outlandish-photo.be

(click on the image at right for more pictures)