Daria Koltsova 'The Kiosk' as part of UKUfest (Ukrainian Art Festival)

The Kiosk

“Whenever I close my eyes, my garden is in front of me,” from an interview with a Crimean Tatar force deported to Uzbekistan in 1933.

Daria Koltsova on her exhibition: ‘“The Kiosk” is my new stained glass installation. Kiosk’s life fades in the past and become a layer of our immaterial memorabilia. I bring this architectural object from outside space into the gallery space, a scene from a dystopian reality lost in space and time. 

Kiosks used to form an eclectic meeting and trading space of the common people — places to buy snacks, drinks or newspapers, to exchange news, account for the latest rumours; an easy going moment to socialize. Kiosks as a subculture, but also as architectural objects transformed into almost contemporary art pieces, countless interrelated objects are woven together into a colourful mess, in which one can hardly notice the salesperson who drowns in his supplies. 

Inspired by this spontaneous visual language, I filled the windows of the kiosk with stained glass postcards, memories of the land I love and miss, the land that might be partly destroyed, but symbolic pieces of it are saved in the permanence of these images. The landscapes are simplified to the visual codes, composition of colourful stripes, like the Ukrainian flag. What is a postcard? A symbolic piece of land, that one can keep with them or share with others. Places change, sometimes beyond recognition, but the postcard stores it the way it used to be.

In the world we live we feel the need to store records in our own personal random access memories. Dramatic events multiply and bring our reality to slowly collapse and drift away at faster pace, our souvenirs and imagination remain the unique reminiscence of such idealized “beauty”.
In the serial “The last of us”, the protagonists of this dystopian universe wander through the ruins of civilization, carrying the acute memories of a world only left alive in their minds. As resources go scarce and entropy takes on, as the war deprive of live whole cities, is our present so different of such representations or from the books of science fiction of Barjavel. 

3 metal and glass sculptures in a shape of sunflowers are disposed around. They are called “Witnesses”. Together with the kiosk and postcard stands they all create a dystopian poetic space in which these totemic representations transform the room into an archive of memories, feelings and reflections.’
Daria Koltsova 

Daria Koltsova (b 1987) is an Ukrainian artist based in Paris. Koltsova graduated from Academy of Design and Art in Kharkiv and worked in Kyiv until the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Koltsova is one of the most acclaimed young Ukrainian artists, her work has been exhibited at institutions like Suprainfinit Gallery (Bucharest), Ludwig Museum (Cologne), Albertina Museum (Vienna), National museum Mystetskyi Arsenal (Kyiv).