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Slight Fictions

FEBRUARY 26鈥揗础搁颁贬 23, 2026
Alex Belardo Kostiw
Curated By Sof铆a S谩nchez Borboa

There is an old paradox, retold by Anne Carson from Jorge Luis Borges, of an empire that created a map so precise, it matched the depicted territory at a 1:1 scale. For an onlooker, the map became indistinguishable from the land itself, revealing the paradox: When representation becomes 鈥渁bsolute,鈥� where does it end and the world begin? What place does representation occupy in relation to the represented? And in this sense, at what point does description become a parallel reality? Slight Fictions operates in this threshold. The works do not mirror the world so much as they double it. They run alongside lived experience, occasionally overlapping and sometimes diverging. Language behaves architecturally, shaping how space is perceived and occupied.

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 Carri贸n 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 exhibitiong extends from that logic outward. In Alex Belardo Kostiw鈥檚 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 setting 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, and 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.

Artist bio

Alex Belardo Kostiw constantly investigates the book as an interactive object and as a space through installation-based storytelling. Their work folds poetic text and image into visual structures of comics and conceptually driven forms. Looking closely at the familiar, their work frames unknown possibilities in the everyday, in human connection and in the self. Alex has exhibited at numerous comics festivals and art book fairs. Their work is in such collections as the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Pratt Institute Artist鈥檚 Books Collection, RISD Artist鈥檚 Books Collection and Yale University Haas Arts Library Special Collections. Alex is an assistant professor of visual communication design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They also teach risography at Spudnik Press, a community print studio, and design publications for art and culture institutions.

Curator Bio

Sof铆a S谩nchez Borboa (b. Mexico, 1992) is a distinguished Mexican curator. She has held exhibition-making roles at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City, the Sullivan Galleries and the Field Museum in Chicago. With over 20 independently curated exhibitions, her work emphasizes immersive, interactive art experiences that often center on storytelling, identity politics and cultural memory. She holds a bachelor鈥檚 degree in art history from Centro de Cultura Casa Lamm and a master's degree in visual and critical studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recently, she published Anyone Who Has Never Been Bored Cannot Be a Storyteller, a fragmentary narrative of Coyoac谩n, Mexico City.