THE NEW RARE AT GLUE BOOK FAIR 2026
Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London · 12–13 September 2026
The New Rare will take part in GLUE Book Fair 2026 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London on 12–13 September 2026, joining independent publishers, artists and artist-led projects for a weekend devoted to contemporary publishing.
For GLUE, The New Rare introduces the first books in The New Rare Pocket Book Series, beginning with publications by Giorgio Sadotti, Anna Howard, Nina Porter and Melanie Counsell.
Small by design, the series takes the pocket book seriously as a format: portable, affordable, easy to circulate and capable of carrying an artist's work beyond the exhibition, studio or institution that produced it.
Alongside the new series, The New Rare will bring a tightly selected group of small-format publications from its archive — artist books, exhibition catalogues, pamphlets and printed matter chosen partly for their scale, portability and relationship to the pocket-book form.
The table becomes its own temporary collection.
For The New Rare, book fairs perform another function too.
They are temporary shopfronts.
The project has largely been encountered through an online archive, where objects are photographed, researched, registered and placed back into circulation. A book fair changes that relationship. The books can be picked up. Scale becomes physical. Condition becomes visible. A publication can be encountered because its cover catches someone's attention, then opened into a much wider history.
It is perhaps the closest The New Rare currently comes to occupying the space between bookshop, archive and studio visit.
These occasions allow The New Rare to meet the people who have been encountering the project online, introduce the archive to people finding it for the first time, and return objects to the social conditions for which many of them were originally made: handling, conversation, exchange and circulation.
For now, these temporary spaces are where The New Rare meets its public in person, while we work towards a more permanent physical home in London.
GLUE Book Fair 2026 arrives at an important point in the development of the project.
An archive of older printed matter now sits beside a new publishing programme. Historical objects circulate alongside artist publications produced in 2026. What began as a way of looking again at material already in circulation increasingly becomes a way of producing new material to enter it.
The New Rare Pocket Book Series — Giorgio Sadotti, Anna Howard, Nina Porter and Melanie Counsell — makes that shift visible in miniature.
Four days later, The New Rare returns to the Institute of Contemporary Arts for the first public presentation of Matthew Peers' Wishing Wells, 2023–2025 and the launch of The New Rare Editions' first artist book.
12–13 September — The New Rare at GLUE Book Fair 2026.
17 September — Matthew Peers, Wishing Wells, 2023–2025, at the ICA.
For one week in September, The New Rare moves off the screen.
GLUE Book Fair 2026
Institute of Contemporary Arts
London
12–13 September 2026
Free entry