Jan Kempenaers - Foarte Division Bell treaba asta

Photos of Abandoned and Mysterious Yugoslavian Monuments

in featureshoot.com

by Andi Vollmer

Jan Kempenaers is an Antwerp based photographer and is attending the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at the University College Ghent in Belgium where he is working on a PhD in the visual arts about the picturesque landscape.

Kempenaers undertook a laborious trek through the Balkans in order to photograph a series of these mysterious objects for his book Spomenik. These structures were commissioned by former Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito in the 1960s and 70s to commemorate sites where WWII battles took place, or where concentration camps stood. After the Republic dissolved in early 1990s, they we

re completely abandoned, and their symbolic meanings were forever lost.

Just Another Brick in the Wall

Alternative art systems in Romania, show in Zurich

by Olga Stefan
in kickstarter.com

The title of the exhibition, Just Another Brick in the Wall, comes from the Pink Floyd lyric off the band’s 1979 album, The Wall. A strong protest song, it was originally written against the mind-controlling system of British education. Roger Waters, who wrote the song, said in 2009, “The song is meant to be a rebellion against errant government, against people who have power over you, who are wrong." Just Another Brick in the Wall will focus on the different art systems working simultaneously in Romania, a country that is currently seeing a sort of Renaissance in its artistic output. The show is titled as a double-entendre, alluding to the Berlin wall itself, and the change in political systems, but mainly to the idea that as cultural workers, and as artists, we are also part of a system that we seem to forget and would rather ignore.