Alex Belardo Kostiw’s publishing practice.
Rooted in visual communication design, these works deal in poetic, adapted, and iterative elements, visual structures of comics, and conceptually driven forms. They span artist’s zines and spatial books, which turn a book into a site. ︎ info
Slight Fictions
De Pree Art Center (Holland, MI)
Solo exhibition curated by Sofía Sánchez Borboa
“A book tends to be approached as a thing to be read, a sequence that will be completed. Slight Fictions begins elsewhere, with the proposition that a book is not only an object, but a spatial structure unfolding through time, movement, and encounter.
Ulises Carrión understands the book as a sequence of spaces, where each one is perceived at a different moment. Meaning does not reside in a single page or image; rather, it emerges through delay, interruption, and adjacency. Reading is not about consumption but about traversing, and in this sense, the book functions as an architectural system that is entered, crossed, and only partially inhabited.
This exhibition extends that logic outward. In Alex Belardo Kostiw’s practice, the book is treated as a site rather than a vessel. It is something to move through, not resolve. The show is composed through a montage of printed materials, sound, projection, ceramic forms, and participatory structures. These elements are bound through cuts, seams, folds, and overlaps weaving a space that must be navigated rather than decoded.
Ulises Carrión understands the book as a sequence of spaces, where each one is perceived at a different moment. Meaning does not reside in a single page or image; rather, it emerges through delay, interruption, and adjacency. Reading is not about consumption but about traversing, and in this sense, the book functions as an architectural system that is entered, crossed, and only partially inhabited.
This exhibition extends that logic outward. In Alex Belardo Kostiw’s practice, the book is treated as a site rather than a vessel. It is something to move through, not resolve. The show is composed through a montage of printed materials, sound, projection, ceramic forms, and participatory structures. These elements are bound through cuts, seams, folds, and overlaps weaving a space that must be navigated rather than decoded.
Some of the works ask to be handled, reshuffled, or perused. Others remain suspended, fragmentary, or partially withheld. Shadows act as a writing without language. Images repeat without settling into one single narrative. Sound introduces duration, insisting on time as a material condition of meaning. The exhibition unfolds not all at once, but reveals itself through lingering.
Throughout Slight Fictions, systems of organization, such as libraries, indexes, sequences, and editions appear, only to loosen their structure. Classification becomes provisional, knowledge drifts, accumulates, and slips away. Meaning is shaped through use, chance, and attention rather than authority or completion.
These are not fictions of displacement. The works do not seek to replace the world or pull the reader away from it; instead, they stay close to it, introducing subtle deviations that allow perception to recalibrate. This exhibition proposes the idea that books, images, and artworks are not interpretations of reality but, instead, environments nested within it; these are places where meaning is assembled at every instant, through movement, encounter, and attention.” Sofía Sánchez Borboa
Throughout Slight Fictions, systems of organization, such as libraries, indexes, sequences, and editions appear, only to loosen their structure. Classification becomes provisional, knowledge drifts, accumulates, and slips away. Meaning is shaped through use, chance, and attention rather than authority or completion.
These are not fictions of displacement. The works do not seek to replace the world or pull the reader away from it; instead, they stay close to it, introducing subtle deviations that allow perception to recalibrate. This exhibition proposes the idea that books, images, and artworks are not interpretations of reality but, instead, environments nested within it; these are places where meaning is assembled at every instant, through movement, encounter, and attention.” Sofía Sánchez Borboa
Pakiramdam
Co-Prosperity (Chicago, IL)
Digital prints on organza and paper, acrylic paint, vinyl, wood, fishing wire
Photos by Colectivo Multipolar, courtesy of Co-Prosperity
Pakiramdam, a Tagalog word roughly meaning an intuitive or empathetic sensing of something or someone, is an installation that explores how geographic and temporal distances can be collapsed by moments of recognition, a sense of kinship, or a memory. The project encodes my family’s history of immigration and migration, the in-betweenness of mixed-race identity, and embodiments of hybridity along the way. It interrogates how we locate ourselves, not just within place and time, but in relation to others; what it means to be present to others in spite of physical absence or distance; and notions of authenticity and synthesis in relation to cultural and personal identities.
Like spirits, we come together, overlap, and drift past each other in the narrative spaces of the project, a space in Chicago and in the countries of our minds.
There between Light and Shadow
Chicago Artists Coalition (Chicago, IL)
Two-person exhibition with Youree Kim, curated by Leo Yiwei Wang
Ceramics; cyanotypes on off-cut French paper, Stonehenge paper concertinas, and dyed mulberry paper (Hanji) concertinas; digital prints on transparencies; bookbinding thread
My installation in the dual exhibition consists of five parts:
Act 1 (Atmospheres)
Act 2 (Fist breaking open)
Act 3 (It stops me to see it)
Colophon (The Hour)
Notes (Often, I forget, you know)
This process-driven work attempts to capture the timelessness of dappled light filtering through the trees during the summer using cyanotypes on a variety of paper forms; in meditative text on transparencies; and through the fragility and weight of suspended ceramics, a medium that is the result of an atmosphere of heat.
Ultimately, dappled light (and whatever it stands for) continues to elude the work. The ceramics cast rows of shadows like illegible lines of text. The transparencies feign intangibility. The cyanotypes try repeatedly and iteratively. Visitors were invited to contact me to receive parts of the installation after the show.
Here are the remnants of sunlight—light that has leaned in through windows, unfurled across walls and floors, and dappled the ground. It stops me to see it, light playing on shadow. Couldn’t I pick up and hold the pieces, the lines, the countless pinhole pictures of a sun, leaking—stretching—drifting?
But I can’t even hold the hour. I can’t close my fist around such a fleet-footed thing any more than I can bear the heaviness of light.
Here are my attempts. I’ve stopped many times to watch light cut the shadows of the hour. Our dark doppelgangers wink and sway to our score of long calls, creaky growing, insistent erosions, and other frictions.
Untroubled by any of it. In every time, in every place.
Shadows change resemblances. No matter how my heart is beating, light remains outside my fist. Going no where, with the hour, while I am only here.
In pursuit of the tiger
Chicago Artists Coalition (Chicago, IL)
Installed in To Be Continued..., curated by Sofía Sánchez Borboa, Sophie Buchmueller, and Denny Mwaura
Monoprints on kitakata, risograph prints, inkjet prints, cane, leather, nails, linen thread, found index drawer, wood box, off-cuts of paper and wood, pencils
An interactive, site-specific installation conceptualized as a library, In pursuit of the tiger explores the formation of knowledge through (1) wandering/wondering, (2) encountering and taxonomizing phenomena, and (3) making sense of one’s senses. The installation relies on readers’ encounters with it to develop meaning, gesturing toward knowledge as open ended and living, rather than static or fixed—just as easily lost or discarded as re/discovered and re/made.
A collection of monoprint pages suggest a tiger moving through a landscape; readers leave and take notes for each other based on their encounter with the images. Meanwhile, readers can browse a set of over 500 prints of abstracted photos of flora within 3 miles of the gallery. They may define what the images signify and categorize them in an index drawer; or pull cards from the drawer for a divinatory reading; or recategorize cards at will. Nearby, readers may flip through a concertina collecting words that suggest internal and external landscapes, to build their own story by selecting a few words to “read” as a narrative.
Marginalia guides readers through the installation. As strangers interact with it, they shape a shared reality and collaborate to build new and nebulous knowledge.
I’m calling from a great distance
Screen prints, laserjet prints, and xerox transfers
Photos courtesy of Spudnik Press
A series of varied-edition screenprints and an artist’s book relate the communications between a lighthouse keeper and an interplanetary explorer. A dive into wanderlust, solitude, and homesickness, the work uses the vastness of oceans and space to illuminate the smallness of humanity and the fragility of our bonds with each other.
The prints are divided into two sets. One is a sequence of a woman turning around in an increasingly figurative landscape. The other depicts planets and alien environments. The icons and gestures, which cross over between the prints and the book, become the intimate language of the characters’, and the audience’s, shared experiences. The solo exhibition culminated my work in the Spudnik Press Artist Residency.
books
are
︎ Alex Belardo Kostiw
Alex Belardo Kostiw brings together poetic elements, visual structures of comics, and conceptually driven forms in their artist’s zines, books, and spatial books, works that transform the elements of a book into a site. Rooted in firsthand observation, multifaceted research, and an iterative approach, Alex frames familiar moments in reality as worth attention. Brief and tender, quiet and dense, their work invites the reader to slow down and read closely. Reading becomes multimodal and intuitive, while the story itself resists complete unravelling. Throughout their practice, Alex centers the human impulse to seek connections with the everyday, others, and ourselves through storytelling.
Alex has exhibited at numerous comics and art book fairs internationally. Their work is in such collections as the Joan Flasch Artist’s Book Collection, MassArt Zine and Comics Collection, MICA Decker Library, Pratt Institute Artist’s Books Collection, RISD Artist’s Books Collection, Tufts SMFA Library, and Yale University Haas Arts Library Special Collections, among others. They have led workshops and given talks on print- and zine-making at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago; Wende Museum, Culver City; Suffolk University, Boston; and several community art spaces.
Alex is an Assistant Professor of Visual Communication Design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They also design for art and culture institutions and teach risography at Spudnik Press, a community printmaking studio. They live with many reams of paper and two cats.
contact
︎now / future
Pretty Good Fest, Chicago, IL, October 24Thought Bubble Comic Art Festival, Yorkshire, UK, November 14–15
MASS MoCA Residency, Summer 2027
past
Comics, Zine, and Art Book Fairs
Multiple Formats Art Book Fair, Boston; Miami Zine Fair; MICE, Boston; Pittsburgh Art Book Fair; Detroit Art Book Fair; Pretty Good Fest, Chicago;
TCAF, Toronto;
Seattle Art Book Fair;
Comic Arts Maine Portland;
Multiple Formats Art Book Fair, Boston;
Boston Art Book Fair; Chicago Art Book Fair; Independent Artist Book Fair, New York;
Jersey Art Book Fair, Jersey City, NJ;
LA Art Book Fair (virtual); Autoptic, Minneapolis; CAKE, Chicago; CALA, LA; CXC, Columbus, OH; DiNK, Denver;
SLICE, St. Louis;
Zineland Terrace, Toronto.Exhibitions (*solo/two-person) Slight Fictions, De Pree Art Center, Hope College, Holland, MI*; There between light and shadow, Chicago Artist Coalition, Chicago*; Pakiramdam, Co-Prosperity, Chicago*; I’m calling from a great distance, The Annex at Spudnik Press, Chicago*; Kitchen Table Stories, Evanston Art Center, Evanston; The Anthropology of Motherhood, Carlow University Art Gallery, Pittsburgh; The Velocity of a Page, Tephra ICA, Tephra, VA; Art of the Risograph, Chicago Design Museum.
Residencies Chicago Artists Coalition HATCH Residency (2023–24); In Cahoots Residency (2022); Spudnik Press Artist Residency (2016–17).