Jan Kempenaers: Enjoy the Process

Born in 1968, Antwerp-based photographer Jan Kempenaers is best-known for producing photographic series which centre on urban and natural landscapes. He often works across mixed-media, experimenting with screen-printing. His first solo London exhibition featured his images of Spomeniks, ‘forgotten’ war monuments that litter the landscape of former Yugoslavia. Originally commissioned by President Tito in the sixties and seventies, to commemorate the Second World War, today the monuments remain, battered fragments of a memory that no one can quite recall.

This week, Kempenaers returns to the site of his first show, BREESE LITTLE Gallery, with his new collaborative exhibition, Enjoy The Process. "It’s an overview of newer and older works," the artist says, "ruins and natural landscapes – and combinations of the two – brought together in one show." As the show continues, AnOther speaks to Kempenaers about his past inspirations and upcoming plans.

Jan Kempenaers on... Photography 
"After regular school, I wanted to study film at the Ghent Academy. Back then, if you wanted to study film you had to start with ‘Art Photography and Movie-Making’. For the first two years, you could only study photography and I got stuck with it – I never went into film studies. In the first year, all the teachers were into Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment. But I wasn’t so keen because I always had the feeling that you were missing out on the best moments of the photograph. So I went to the library, to look for alternatives – that was when I saw the work of Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz in the New Topographics which really affected me."

Jan Kempenaers on... the Spomeniks
"Just after the Croatian war I took some photographs in Sarajevo. On rainy days, I went to the library where I found an art encyclopedia. In it, I discovered one of the Spomenik monuments. Years later, I was looking through my archives and with a friend from Zagreb, I started to do some research on how I could photograph them. My friend spoke Serbo-Croatian, so he was able to ask the locals where the monuments were, otherwise they would have been impossible to find. In one work, I photographed the location of a monument that is no longer there. Later, I found a photograph of the original structure in some archives. So I printed it on top of the photograph I had taken of the real landscape. It’s kind of a ‘ghost Spomenik’. So cool.

"There is a sort of strange power around the places where the monuments are...I tried to capture that aura" — Jan Kempenaers

There is a sort of strange power around the places where the monuments are. You feel that something strange happened there. I tried to capture that aura. You can see the monuments were in important places, but because they refer to the previous Communist regime, after the war, they were just abandoned."

Jan Kempenaers on... A Favourite Work
"There is a white, old photograph I once did called Crane, 2004. It’s about this small village, which was demolished because of the new port and docks in Antwerp. I liked the form of the crane and how it was standing there. I took this one out of the series, as I thought it was interesting as an image on its own; the others were more about the village. I still like the image, though I did it years ago."

Jan Kempenaers: Enjoy the Process is at BREESE LITTLE until October 25.

Text by Edwina Langley

Edwina Langley is editor of Absolutely Chelsea and Fulham magazines