The theme of memory lies at the heart of all of van den Berg's artwork, and has done so since he first began painting on shaped canvases to produce ambivalent memorials. Throughout his career, van den Berg has been concerned to address the fact that the drive to remember is always thwarted by the enormity of loss that confronts every generation. The loss is not only material, it is also cultural. For every story told, there are countless others that remain silent, or that are forgotten or only partially known. Much of history remains invisible and inconsolably silent - either because of the mercilessness of time's passage or because power has refused to hear the voices of difference.

In some cases, van den Berg's work is addressed to the art of recovery, as with his installation for the 1996 Faultlines exhibition, in which he revived the story of two men executed in 1735 for loving each other. In other cases, such as the site-specific installation for !Xoe, Nieu-Bethesda and the Mine Dumps projects, or some of the multi-media works of Memorials without Facts (2000) he has used white-washed stones - those tokens of memorialization used on battlefields - to simply remark the fact of loss without fixing a referent or providing archaeological evidence of what has departed. As the title of the latter show implies, van den Berg conceptualizes memorialization as an evocative project, an art of the fleeting, the fugitive and the ephemeral.