Bound Art Book Fair 2026

EDITION X OPENING PARTY

Impiety Hour (FKA Peste), 70 Oldham Road, M4 5EB

8pm-late

A knees-up to celebrate Bound's tenth edition, welcoming all artists who love books, indie publishers, weirdo zinesters, small press heads, print freaks, and their friends. Featuring a rare set from Alex Murray-Leslie of cult electro-feminist pioneers Chicks on Speed, who writer Douglas Coupland once described as "living in a post-Koonsian world with a curated 21st century lifestyle, where everything is art and everyone can be an artist and even non-art is art by default: a readymade!" Joining Alex is Bound stalwart DJ.ME, along with some secret special guests.

X-Rated: Artist talk with Kuba Ryniewicz 

Whitworth Gallery 5

11.30am-12.30pm

Kuba Ryniewicz’s work incorporates fashion campaigns and editorials for magazines such as Butt and Fantastic Man with personal and often graphically intimate depictions of friends and lovers. These are images of the here and now, a living history of queer joy, creative collaboration and marginalised eroticism. In this artist talk, the Polish-born, Newcastle-based photographer will discuss the ways he has navigated issues of sexuality, nudity and the queer body across a range of contexts, as well as the development of his current major exhibition, Close to Home, at the Baltic in Gatehead, which brings his work into dialogue with that of the late Tish Murtha.

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Unofficial Ukraine: Christopher Nunn and Aria Shahrokhshahi in conversation with Eugenia Skvarska

Whitworth Gallery 5

1.00-2.00pm

Christopher Nunn is a Yorkshire-based photographer, filmmaker and researcher who has been working and travelling in Ukraine since 2013, after first visiting the country to learn more about his grandmother’s hometown of Kalush, in the country’s west. With a focus on portraiture, archival imagery and alternative documentary practices, Nunn has been present to document the huge scale of upheaval in the Donbas, both during the 2014 revolution, the regional war that followed, and the devastation of the Russian invasion. Christopher will be in conversation about making work on the Ukrainian front line with the British-Iran artist Aria Shahrokhshahi. Shahrokhshahi’s latest book Wet Ground is a long-term body of work developed through repeated periods living and volunteering in Ukraine since 2019. The book’s title references Shahrokhshahi's survival of a rocket strike while assisting in a medical evacuation of civilians from a frontline town, where wet ground prevented the detonation of a missile. Together the artists will discuss their experiences, their humanitarian activities, and their reflections on a country undergoing a violent transformation. The conversation is moderated by Ukrainian creative director Eugenia Skvarska, herself a refugee, and a tireless advocate for the Ukrainian creative community. Her latest book, Unofficial Dnipro: The Plunging Shore, in collaboration with Kalpesh Lathigra, was recently published by Officialzine. 

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Dirt and Beauty: A roundtable with Jesse Glazzard and Ella Otomewo

Meeting Room 2

2.30-3.30pm

Photographer Jesse Glazzard is joined by the poet Ella Otomewo, long-time friend and subject of many of his photographs, for an intimate roundtable on representation and ethics for working class, trans and queer photographers and models. Jesse and Ella will discuss the dynamics of the photographer-subject relationship, and the challenges presented when photographs representing and visibilising marginalised communities are co-opted by institutions and commercial initiatives. The roundtable, which is open to creatives and models who identify as working class, trans and/or queer, will be an open forum to discuss how it feels to photograph and be photographed, and what happens when those images take on their own life. Jesse will also discuss the production of his new monograph, The Sound of Dirt and Beauty, published this year by MACK. 

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Quiet Storm: Listening Party for Space Afrika

Meeting Room 1

2pm and 3pm

Bound Art Book Fair is honoured to present an exclusive listening party for Quiet Storm, the latest release from the experimental electronic pioneers Space Afrika, the Manchester/Berlin-based duo of Joshua Tarelle Reid and Joshua Inyang. Space Afrika produce raw, intensely detailed, visceral music with shades of ambient, trip-hop, techno, and modern classical, drawing spacious urban dubscapes from the contours of their cities.

It’s a pleasure to welcome Joshua and Joshua back to Bound for our tenth edition. Their performance at the fair in 2019, with live visuals by Amrit Randhawa of Taxi Cab Industries, was a defining moment during the early years of the fair: intimate, experimental and expansive. Once again, these listening sessions will see Quiet Storm accompanied by bespoke visuals that allude to the album’s sprawling, collaborative vision, shaped with profound patience and intention. The musical landscapes allude to spirituality and the human condition, the tension between boldness and softness, ambition, and the inner demons that persist.

Free entry, space limited. Tickets will be available to book via EventBrite soon. 

Screening: Girl with Black Balloons, 2010 

Meeting Room 1

11.00am-12.00pm (59mins)

Girl With Black Balloons is an ode to one of New York’s most fascinating citizens, and to the city’s adventurous spirit in decades gone by. Dutch documentary director Corinne van der Borch discovers the artist mononymously known as Bettina, who has lived and worked in the Chelsea Hotel since the 1970s. Said to be the most beautiful woman to have ever lived in the Chelsea, Bettina remained hidden away in her apartment-studio for over fifty years, producing conceptual works of cosmic ambition. In this multi-faceted portrait, filmed over two years, Bettina lets down her guard and lets van der Borch into the treasure trove of her artwork, revealing the fascinating and painful story of her life. 

“One sees Bettina and understands that some disaster has taken place, long ago,” writes Barrada in Bettina, the book she edited with the designer Gregor Huber, published by Aperture in 2022. Barrada was one of only a handful of people the reclusive artist had permitted to enter [Room] 503 since she moved into the Chelsea in 1972. Despite the bohemian buzz around the hotel, with neighbours including Patti Smith, Bob Dylan and many of Andy Warhol’s entourage, Bettina chose to lock herself away, devoting her life to conceptual works that seemed to flow unstoppably from deep within, a creative impulse she likened to a divine energy. (The Guardian)

Space limited - BOOK HERE VIA EVENTBRITE

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CC’d Zines presents: Say Something You Wouldn't Say Online

Meeting Room 2

11.00am-12.00pm

Join Harry Gammer-Flitcroft of CC’d Zines for a workshop in which participants are invited to write or share images of something they wouldn't post online. It might be private, too personal, or too sensitive. It might generate a fear of ridicule, in a culture where it feels increasingly hard to embrace mistakes or share something unpolished. It might be political: with border control agencies now checking social media and even private phones, self-censorship has quietly become the norm. Why share it in print? Because it can be anonymous, not linked to a social media profile or IP address. Because print offers a way to get something outside of yourself when online isn't the right place. And because it is a form of resistance — putting something into the world that isn't easily scannable, searchable, or fed into a dataset.

This workshop will result in a collaboratively-produced zine designed to resist digitisation: black text on black paper, to frustrate photography and scanning. It will be produced entirely using a photocopier with a built-in scanner, so that submissions can be printed directly, and no digital file of the publication is ever created. 

Places are limited and will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. 

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Liberation Zines: Maddy Norman on the Filton25 and zine-making within the criminal justice system

Whitworth Gallery 5

12.30-1.30pm

Maddy Norman is one of the Filton 25, a group of activists accused of involvement in an action in August 2024 where six Palestine Action activists broke into the newly-built secret site of Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest weapons producer, in Filton, near Bristol. Inside the warehouse, the activists destroyed a shipment of killer quadcopter drones that Israel uses against civilians in Gaza. For their alleged involvement in this action, Maddy spent 554 days in prison on remand, and at their trial on 19th August 2026 the jury refused to convict them, along with seven other defendants. In this conversation, Maddy will discuss the zines they made whilst in prison, and the agency that creative practice can produce within systems of oppression, alongside their broader interests in Palestinian liberation, and prison, police and border abolition.

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New Voices, New Songs

Whitworth Gallery 5

2.00-3.00pm

Our popular New Voices at Bound reading series returns with a selection of performances curated by Barnsley-based collective Borough. Hear artists, writers and poets reading from new and recent works which are available to purchase at the fair, accompanied by visuals.

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Whippersnappers: Annebella Pollen in conversation with Hollie Myles-Moffat

Whitworth Gallery 5

3.15-4.15pm

Do you remember the first photos you took? Whippersnappers by Annabella Pollen is the first book to tell the history of children as photographers, celebrating the creativity, curiosity and distinctive perspectives of generations of young people behind the camera. From school societies in the 1880s, via post-war camera clubs and radical 1970s workshops, to the coming of digital cameras, Whippersnappers traces photography’s movement from an elite pastime to an accessible hobby. For this event, Pollen will be in conversation with Hollie Myles-Moffat, art and design teacher at Fred Longworth High School in Tyldesley, Manchester, about photography education, visual literacy, and what happens when young people are given the tools to tell their own stories. 

This event is designed specifically for young people aged 12-16, but all are welcome. 

An exhibition, curated by Annebella Pollen, Snap Happy! How Children Became Photographers is at The Photographers' Gallery from 14 October 2026 – 21 February 2027.