Here’s an unexpected bonus: a series of pictures of the now (mainly) decaying bombastic communist monuments erected across Yugoslavia in the Tito era to commemorate supposedly heroic Partisan achievements or sites of Nazi and other war crimes by the Communists’ opponents during WW2:

 In the 1980s, these monuments attracted millions of visitors per year, especially young pioneers for their "patriotic education." After the Republic dissolved in early 1990s, they were completely abandoned, and their symbolic meanings were forever lost.

From 2006 to 2009, Kempenaers toured around the ex-Yugoslavia region (now Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, etc.) with the help of a 1975 map of memorials, bringing before our eyes a series of melancholy yet striking images.

His photos raise a question: can these former monuments continue to exist as pure sculptures? On one hand, their physical dilapidated condition and institutional neglect reflect a more general social historical fracturing. And on the other hand, they are still of stunning beauty without any symbolic significances.

Steady on! Stunning beauty rather overdoes it – many of them are sprawling gargoyles of tritely crass communist concrete ‘symbolism’, defacing the disconcertingly beautiful countryside where these lonely WW2 clashes and massacres took place.

Still, quite a collection – the fact that they are now mostly disintegrating or neglected does give them a new and rather improved ‘organic’ quality. See eg Tjentište