During Turin Art Week 2025, there’s a newsstand in Piazza San Carlo that will stay lit with a different kind of light (through November 6). It’s Postcards from Home, the site-specific installation by the Ukrainian artist Daria Koltsova, curated by Valeria Radkevych. A historic kiosk is transformed into a space suspended between memory and presence, where fragility becomes a language and light, living matter.

Koltsova replaces the kiosk’s windows with abstract stained glass inspired by Ukrainian landscapes, glass fragments that take on the size of old postcards. Each pane is a window onto a world that is dissolving, yet endures in memory. Transparency becomes an archive, color becomes the voice of a landscape both wounded and alive. The work is a gesture of protection and testimony, a reflection on the need to safeguard memory in times of destruction.

“War devastates the land and forces people to flee,” the artist states. “But you never really flee alone.” In every exile one carries a piece of home, a story, an image: the “postcards” Koltsova evokes are the very fragments of identity we recover from oblivion. The kiosk, in the heart of the city, thus becomes a true metaphor for refuge, a small urban sanctuary where collective memory is reassembled through light.

Each landscape contained in the stained glass is reduced to its essence: primary colors, pure forms, symbols. As in the Ukrainian flag – the blue of the sky and the yellow of wheat – we find the spirit of a land that continues to speak even when everything seems lost.

Drawing on the traditional technique of stained glass, often linked to sacred places, Koltsova renews its spiritual meaning: no longer mere decoration or ornament, but an act of faith in the strength of nature and memory. Bringing light into something, in this context, becomes a gesture of resistance and rebirth.

Postcards from Home is a glass house that doesn’t belong to any specific place, yet one everyone can recognize within themselves: in their departures and returns, in the images that continue to illuminate memory.