Hope College, Michigan
Photo cred. Alex Belardo Kostiw
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 one-to-one scale. For an onlooker, the map became indistinguishable from the land itself, revealing the paradox: when representation becomes “absolute,” where does it end and where does 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?
Photo cred. Alex Belardo Kostiw
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.
Photo cred. Alex Belardo Kostiw
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.
Photo cred. Alex Belardo Kostiw
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.
Photo cred. Alex Belardo Kostiw
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.
Photo cred. Alex Belardo Kostiw
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.
Photo cred. Alex Belardo Kostiw
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.
To enter Slight Fictions is to step into a terrain where reading becomes navigation, and where the act of sense-making remains deliberately unfinished.
Photo cred. Alex Belardo Kostiw