Perimeter x Melbourne Art Book Fair 2026
Perimeter is looking forward to seeing you at the Melbourne Art Book Fair (MABF) 2026, taking place at the National Gallery of Victoria's Great Hall from May 15–17. The Stallholder Fair brings together a broad mix of local and international publishers, artists, designers, and collectives working across contemporary printed matter.
Alongside showcasing titles from Perimeter Editions (Naarm / Melbourne), we will be offering a selection from our distributed publishers InOtherWords (London), The Ice Plant (Los Angeles), Set Margins (Eindhoven), Chose Commune (Marseille), Art Paper Editions (Ghent), Primary Information (New York) and more. Perimeter will also be representing Idea Books (Amsterdam), an international distributor of specialist art, photography, architecture and design books. At this stand you can find titles from key Dutch publishers Roma Publications, FW: Books, The Eriskay Connection and more.
We are also thrilled to be hosting stands on behalf of our favourite publishers Spector Books (Leipzig) and Valiz (Amsterdam), which will feature their impressive catalogues on topics of art, design, photography and art theory and criticism.
At the Perimeter table, we will be launching a number of new Perimeter Editions titles, with talks and signings taking place throughout the fair. Signings are to be confirmed in the coming weeks, but see more information about Perimeter-related programs at MABF below!
Please note that Perimeter Books will be closed Friday May 15 and Saturday May 16 while all Perimeter staff are at MABF and Offprint London!
NGV's Melbourne Art Book Fair
May 15–17, 2026
NGV International
180 St Kilda Road
Friday May 15: 10am–5pm
Saturday May 16: 10am–5pm
Sunday May 17: 10am–5pm
Free entry
Friday, May 15 | PANEL AND LAUNCH: Repair Stories
2pm–2.30pm, Talks Stage NGV International
Presented by Perimeter
Australia is at the frontline of the climate crisis. While worsening natural disasters and species extinction are met with glacial shifts in national climate policy, an important undercurrent of projects working to repair the Australian narrative are at play.
Repair Stories (Perimeter Editions 129), a new collection of texts edited by Lucy Benjamin, Hélène Frichot and Virginia Mannering, unpicks the concealing power of disrepair by giving life to reparative projects already at work in the context of the Australian built environment – both in theory and in practice. These stories seek to repair a continent that continues to live under the structuring logic of colonial dispossession and extractive economies.
Featuring contributions from architects, artists, designers and educators, Repair Stories interrogates the methods, limitations, obligations and potential of repair, and proposes repair as an environmental imperative.
The launch brings together editors Lucy Benjamin, Hélène Frichot and Virginia Mannering with contributors Camille Perry, Simon Robinson and Nina Tory-Henderson to ask questions about Australia’s past, and how we can collaborate on repairing its future.
Find out more about this event here.
Pre-order your copy of Repair Stories here.
Saturday, May 16 | TALK AND LAUNCH: David Thomas – Amid
1pm–1.30pm, Talks Stage NGV International
Presented by Perimeter
Amid is a celebration of the complexity of art, life and the wonder of simple things. It is a book, to paraphrase the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, of ‘subtleties and tolerances’. The book offers a space for musing… when we muse, we do not have to conclude, but can accept what is there in all its openness. Amid brings painting, text and photography together as a composite in the form of a book.
Amid is the latest publication from Melbourne/Naarm-based artist David Thomas, published by Perimeter Editions. The event brings together Thomas and designer Stuart Geddes to discuss the scope of the artist book and their collaborative approach in producing Amid.
Find out more about this event here.
Pre-orders for Amid coming soon!
Saturday, May 16 | PANEL: The Fair Format
2pm–2.45pm, Talks Stage NGV International
Presented by NGV
Art book fairs are vital sites of exchange, bringing together artists, publishers and audiences to share ideas, test formats and build communities around publishing.
This panel brings together practitioners reshaping the format and conventions of art book fairs across Australia and the Asia Pacific. It considers their evolving role within publishing ecologies, and how fairs can support emerging voices, diasporic communities and non-traditional practices, while navigating questions of scale, access and sustainability.
Moderated by Sen Vanderzalm (artist and Co-Curator of the Melbourne Art Book Fair), Perimeter – as co-presenter of Same Page Art Book Fair – will join the organisers of FreakBooks and Press Print Party to discuss the art book fair as a site for creative exchange.
Find out more about this event here.
Sunday, May 17 | PANEL AND LAUNCH: Dredging up the Past: Gertrude 2005–2025
3pm–4pm, Talks Stage NGV International
Presented by Perimeter and Gertrude
Perimeter and Gertrude launch Dredging up the Past: Gertrude 2005–2025 (Perimeter Editions 117). The launch takes the form of a conversation between Mark Feary, Charlotte Day, Nathan Beard, and Tamsen Hopkinson, exploring questions of institutional memory and the shifting conditions that shape artist-centred organisations.
Taking the publication as a starting point, the discussion reflects on Gertrude’s history and probes the tensions between archival impulse and forward momentum: what it means to revisit institutional histories, how they are written and what remains unresolved or contested within them.
Charlotte Day brings a long-standing relationship to Gertrude, having worked at Gertrude in the 1990s, and as editor of the organisation’s twentieth anniversary publication, A Short Ride in a Fast Machine: Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces 1985–2005 (2005). Day’s perspective, alongside Mark Feary’s curatorial work across institutional and independent contexts, informs a discussion that moves between reflection and speculation, examining how contemporary institutions narrate themselves and how those narratives might be productively unsettled.
In representation of artistic and curatorial voices, Mark and Charlotte will be joined by Nathan Beard and Tamsen Hopkinson. Nathan Beard is a former Gertrude Studio Artist who works across photography, sculpture and installation to draw on personal archives, family objects and ornamental motifs to examine what it means to inherit a relationship to culture that is shaped by both proximity and distance. Tamsen Hopkinson is an artist, curator and curatorial consultant. Hopkinson is the Director of Seol for, a curatorial consultancy studio specialising in contemporary art across the Asia Pacific, and curated Octopus 23: THE FIELD at Gertrude Contemporary in 2023.
Presented within the context of the Melbourne Art Book Fair at the National Gallery of Victoria, the launch situates Gertrude’s publishing and program within broader conversations around contemporary art institutions: where they have come from, how they are sustained and where they might yet go.
Find out more about this event here.
Order your copy of Dredging up the Past: Gertrude 2005-2025 here.