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Back for its 11th year, the National Gallery of Victoria’s annual Melbourne Art Book Fair brings together more than 100 leading publishers, artists and designers from the Asia-Pacific region. The event features a three-day stallholder marketplace and 11 days of talks and panels, launches and exhibitions, celebrating art and design publishing for Melbourne Design Week.
The main event is the Stallholder Fair, held in the NGV’s Great Hall from May 16 to 18. Here visitors can access limited edition books, prints, magazines and more from a diverse selection of creatives, or introduce budding young artists and storytellers to the printed form with Kids Pumpkin Storytime, a reading session with some of Melbourne’s best-loved children’s book creators.
Keep an eye out for Newsstand, which offers free print editorials from Melbourne publications and presses The Paris End, Long Prawn and N0 R3PLY, and Indonesian studios Krack and Binatang Press. There’s also Books by the Gram, where Long Prawn allows you to take a modular approach to book-buying. Assemble your own publication by choosing the recipes and sections you want to take home, then pay for it by weight – just $1.99 per gram.
Outside of the Stallholder Fair, here are our picks from the program.
Inheritance by Phuong Ngo
This year is the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, and artist Phuong Ngo’s photobook Inheritance is a fitting examination of individual and collective identities within the Vietnamese diaspora. The book explores the artist’s ancestral home in Vietnam, uniting the two families that are its subject through colonialism, conflict and displacement.
The book’s launch coincides with the artist’s major solo exhibition at West Space, in Collingwood Yards, and will feature a talk with Ngo, artist and publisher Nikki Lam and designer and publisher Scott Heinrich.
Inheritance launches at 2pm on May 24 at Collingwood Yards.
How to Manifest(o)
Azul Bermudez and Sen Vanderzalm, better known as Melbourne-based duo N0 R3PLY, invite visitors to develop their own statements of intent as part of a three-hour workshop on building a manifesto.
Historically used to as a tool to disrupt, challenge and redefine creative paradigms, the art manifesto gives creatives momentum to carve out space for emerging ideas. N0 R3PLY draw on their practice of highlighting the dynamic relationship between culture, material and language to engage participants and help them define their own artistic values and contribute to a larger conversation on art and design.
The workshop will cover excerpts from famous manifestos and give participants access to ephemera from the NGV collection.
This workshop takes place from 11am on May 16 and 12pm on May 17 &18 in the NGV’s Level 2 Gallery Space.
Catherine Griffiths: Out of Line
Over four decades, acclaimed artist, designer and typographer Catherine Griffiths has built a career using language, light and sound as both materials and conceptual forces. The New Zealander’s practice explores the intersection of typography and language in public spaces.
[This major exhibition](https://artbookfair.melbourne/event/out-of-line-catherine-griffiths features a newly commissioned site-specific installation and will be accompanied by a program of artist talks.
Catherine Griffiths: Out of Line launches at 4pm on May 17 and runs daily 10am–4pm until June 6 in the Design Gallery at the Melbourne School of Design in Parkville.
Print Panorama Experiment
Prepare to get inky at this one-hour screen-printing workshop hosted by Troppo Print Studio. Participants will produce their own silkscreen prints that will then be collated as part of a collaborative visual poetry project and publication by the end of the Stallholder Fair.
This workshop takes place at 2pm on May 16, and at 11am and 2pm on May 17 & 18 in the NGV’s Level 1 Learn Studios.
Indie Pubs – This Page Is Not Empty
Whose stories get printed? From zines to manifestos, risograph prints to hand-bound books, independent publishing has long been where the marginalised take control of their own narratives. This exhibition, curated and designed by Master of Communication Design students at Nightingale Brunswick East (led by Dr Fayen D’Evie), traces the history of independent publications in Melbourne and their role in resistance, resilience and rebellion.
Accompanying the exhibition will be a series of talks by contemporary practitioners, ahead of the release of the RMIT Design Archives Journal issue on independent publications in June.
The exhibition opens on May 16, with opening night celebrations 5pm–9pm, and runs daily 10am–2pm until May 18 at Nightingale Wurru Wurru Biik in Brunswick.
The 2025 Melbourne Art Book Fair runs from May 15 to May 25. See the program for more details.
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