All photographs were taken by Jan Kempenaers in 2010 during a road trip through the southern part of the United States, from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Jan Kempenaers is affiliated to KASK/School of Arts Ghent. This series is part of Kempenaers' artistic research project.

During the 1960s and 70s, thousands of monuments commemorating the Second World War called 'Spomeniks' were built throughout the former Yugoslavia; striking monumental sculptures, with an angular geometry echoing the shapes of flowers, crystals, and macro-views of viruses or DNA. In the 1980s the Spomeniks still attracted millions of visitors from the Eastern bloc; today they are largely neglected and unknown, their symbolism lost and unwanted. Antwerp-based photographer Jan Kempenaers travelled the Balkans photographing these eerie objects, presented in this book as a powerful typological series. The beauty and mystery of the isolated, crumbling Spomeniks informs Kempenaer's enquiry into memory, found beauty, and whether former monuments can function as pure sculpture.

Many of the works of the Belgian photographer Jan Kempenaers are artistic presentations of fragments of our environment - landscapes, as we have come to call them. Some of these landscapes are natural ones and continue an overtly picturesque tradition, like for instance his arresting photographs of rocks and forest landscapes. Others may come across as natural but upon close examination they reveal the traces of man's

Fashion design is not a category usually associated with war, but in fact it is a consideration that all war-mongers must take into account when they are planning battles, be they naval or air, military or rebel, national or international. Every country in the world has its own camouflage--can you tell from the various patterns which country is trying to hide from you? "Useful Photography No. 4: The War Special" exhibits what different countries wear when they go to war and the products that keep them hidden on the front lines.

"The exhibition brings together a range of works that explore continuity by bringing their past and future into the same frame, as well as projects that are predicated on their centrifugal circulation outside the parameters of traditional art spaces ..."--Publisher's website.