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 (ii)
Risograph prints, accordion fold in folio, and saddle-stitched pamphlet, 8.5 x 5.5 inches each.
This revisits a spatial book of the same name, offering another mode of encountering its narrative. While the spatial book was site-specific and temporary, this print edition leans into the places that no longer exist except in familial imagination. The edition is variable, featuring different selections of altered family photos. It is a collection of thoughts on how migration often leads to fragmentation within a family—not just separating them from each other, but from a collective sense of home.
book/marks, 2019 —
This series crystallizes those aimless images and thoughts that I keep returning to, while exploring the possibilities of a 7 x 2-inch format.
IV: Somewhere, a witch wanders, wandless
16 pages, accordion fold, risograph, 2024, 7 x 2 inches
In book/mark IV, a witch seeks her missing friend, slipping and tumbling, pacing and falling through panel after panel, page after page. Will she ever find it?
III: 6 Wings
6 pages, accordion fold, reduction woodcut, glue, 2022, 7 x 2 inches
6 Wings reimagines the mythological multi-limbed, winged Geryon, whom Hercules murdered for his red cows. Few depictions of Geryon have survived antiquity. To echo that, making this book, a reduction woodcut print with collaged covers, involved destroying the print matrix and parts of the prints. The book embraces Geryon as a fugitive body—forever beyond our grasp.
II: Wendr
12 pages, saddle-stitch binding, risograph, 7 x 2 inches
Wendr is a spell, cast on me by a stick I saw on the ground c. 2017. Years later, I was still thinking about it. Ruminating on magical wands, the book changes in orientation and reading direction so that reading it is akin to the pull and push of energy that characterizes magic.
Meanwhile, a witch wanders, wandless...
I: A Name
12 pages, saddle-stitch binding, risograph, 7 x 2 inches
A Name is a brief, personal reflection on what it might mean to make a person. With images that allude to Greek mythology, Penelope, “the name without a girl,” is my idea of a daughter.
Sa Salita—Stories He Took with Him
26 pages, stab-stitch binding with fold-out pages, laserjet, 8.5 x 5.5 inches
A collection of fragments of my grandfather’s stories set alongside drawings of his hand gestures. Each page unfolds to reveal illustrations, bits of personal photos, and reproduced woodcuts that reference Filipino folktales and myths, my grandfather’s life and migration, and the dining table where I would sit across from my grandfather and listen. Together images and texts describe a dozen stories and imply many more.
3 Waves
Three accordion folds, 22 pages each, in an envelope, risograph, 2.5 x 2.75 inches
This is a collection about water: glancing along a beach; stirring inside a body; and shaping a human world. The text is assembled from bits and pieces of articles about exploration. The accordion-fold structure and slow revelatory rhythm are haiku-like—as the landscape unfolds, our sense of the scene at hand expands and shifts. Printed on the reverse side of each book is a black-and-white image of water.
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 festivals 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
Slight Fictions, solo exhibition at De Pree Art Center, Hope College, Holland, MI.Multiple Formats Art Book Fair, Boton, MA.
Miami Zine Fair, Miami, FL.
past
Comics, Zine, and Art Book Fairs
MICE, Boston; Pittsburgh Art Book Fair; Detroit Art Book Fair; Pretty Good Fest;
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) 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 MASS MoCCA (2027); Chicago Artists Coalition HATCH Residency (2023–24); In Cahoots Residency (2022); Spudnik Press Artist Residency (2016–17).