Review #13: Alternative Circulation: Notes from the Cairo Art Book Fair

Mawadah Nofal

Cairo Art Book Fair (CABF) is open to the general public for three days from 11 to 13 December 2025. The fair brings together local and international independent publishers, as well as artists, designers, and book distributors, offering a varied selection of art books, magazines, and posters from all over the world, alongside a public program of talks, book launches, roundtable discussions, and workshops.

When I joined the Cairo Art Book Fair (CABF) team to coordinate the public program of the fair’s fourth edition, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Although I had never been in Cairo while the fair was taking place, I had heard about it over the years, through mounting enthusiasm from artists, bookmakers, friends, and publishers who consistently described it as an exciting and vital space of gathering. Having long been interested in the intersection between art and bookmaking, I joined the team enthusiastically. From afar, I had already come to see CABF as a necessary, and surprisingly rare, platform for experimental publishing in Cairo. Above all, I was curious to experience/encounter the fair from the inside and to observe how visitors engaged with a space that occupies a considerably radical position within Cairo’s cultural scene.

The weeks leading up to the big weekend were stressful and dense, filled with bureaucracy, long online meetings, and the familiar tension of organizing something largely independent while navigating logistical constraints. Our team was small, consisting of only five people who worked nearly around the clock, and routinely extending beyond our assigned roles. This kind of elasticity is often overlooked in cultural work, even though it functions as a condition of exhaustion: unpaid or underpaid labor, emotional negotiation, last-minute problem-solving, and the quiet expectation of care work holding everything together. The fair’s existence depended on collective commitment and individual sacrifice, revealing the very fragile infrastructure that sustains spaces like CABF amid the reality of little funding, material support, and absence of an existing culture of art book fairs in the city.

These conditions are not incidental; they shape what the fair can and cannot be. Decisions around scale, accessibility, language, and programming are never merely curatorial; they are always entangled with time, money, culture, and labor. CABF exists within a cultural economy that expects those involved to give more than they can afford to give, in the absence of broader structural support or infrastructure. Coordinating a “public program” raised its own set of questions: who was this public, exactly? How public could the fair truly be? And how could the intimidating and often inaccessible world of bookmaking and publishing be made more accessible? In designing the program, it was important to ensure that accessibility did not translate to simplification. Rather, it meant foregrounding curiosity, play, and openness while remaining attentive to the practical and intellectual rigor of the publications and works featured in the fair. Our intention was to create a program that felt like an invitation, emphasising that these publications were not closed objects for specialists or those already embedded in creative circuits, but portals into imaginative and critical worlds.

This edition of Cairo Art Book Fair hosted over ninety exhibitors from twenty-seven countries and was held at Ghurnata Community Space, a historic neo-Islamic building that once hosted royal horse races and has since been converted into a venue for large-scale cultural events. The building is visually striking, grand, beautiful, and imposing. It carries traces of power and prestige that are difficult to ignore. Upon entering the building, one is immediately overwhelmed. Crowds swarming exhibitors’ tables, unfolding posters and prints, rummaging through stacks of stickers, flicking through oversized photobooks, or carefully reading miniature zines. The space is noisy and kinetic, filled with overlapping conversations, the soft rustling of paper, chatter and laughter, and occasional frustration as bodies move through the space.

Visitors make their way toward the workshop area: some join a poster-making workshop with Ntsal Studio, others a paper-making workshop with The Good Paper, while parents usher their children to a photobook-making session with photographer Aly Zaraay. Beyond the main hall, visitors gather in the garden area for the Public Program, which included book launches with The Muse Multi Studios, panel discussion with international artists like Camilla Pavlikova Sandland, conversations with Les Complices*, project presentations like Nora Aly’s exploration of the endangered Nubian language, and engagements with illustrators and publishers from around the world. The fair feels less like a temporary ecosystem than a space shaped by relationships and exchanges, thriving on movement, touch, and encounter. During a panel discussion, Jaime Sebastian, designer and co-founder of Handshake, discusses art book fairs as places where designers and publishers can meet readers and exchange feedback, often making changes based on their comments. He shared that these fairs are increasingly rare places where artists, writers, and readers can convene. Throughout the fair, many exhibitors and visitors alike expressed this: that it wasn’t just a place for buying and selling, but a reminder that things were still happening. These moments dialogue slow the fair down, creating pockets of listening within the constant motion.

Art books themselves are notoriously difficult to define. They are deviant and porous objects, often resisting categorization altogether. Art book fairs, in turn, share the same resistance. One of their most defining characteristics is their ability to host and circulate publications without an ISBN, meaning that these books do not pass through official channels of production, distribution, or approval. This alone clearly situates art book fairs as spaces of alternative circulation. Beyond format, the publications themselves engage with subjects often sidelined in mainstream cultural spaces: religion, sexuality, politics, philosophy, mutual aid, displacement, and solidarity. These are not niche concerns but urgent issues, yet they are frequently rendered invisible, unpublishable, or unsellable elsewhere in the city. Moreover, exhibitors sell posters, postcards, stickers, and more — visitors are given the chance to take home beautifully crafted printed matter at a relatively accessible price point, showing the multidisciplinary nature of the creatives behind these works. The art book fair, as a typology, allows artists to get experimental, moving beyond conventions of authorship, narrative, research, and form, creating publications (and other mediums) that are intuitive and ever-expanding in possibility. I felt that these publications gave digestible pathways to readers on otherwise complicated topics. During the fair, I picked up The Light of a Distant Stars (2025), a research publication by Contemporary Image Collective accompanied by a collection of maps uncovering pan-African movements in Cairo in the 1960s, two issues of Mizna, What is Beyond You (2024), a risograph zine by visual artist Esraa Elfeky on her two expeditions in Saint Catherine, Decaying Bank: Reproducing Khartoum Visually (2022–2024) by the Muse Multi Studios, and more.

For this edition, CABF was particularly attentive to questions of process and production: how books are made, what materials are used, under what conditions, and through what kinds of labor, collaboration, and compromise. By foregrounding process, the fair positioned publishing not as a polished end product, but as an ongoing, collective practice shaped by material realities. Additionally, it emphasized that form and content work in conjunction within the mechanics of imagination and world-building—art book fairs insist on this fact. As Ursula Le Guin (2016) writes, words are the wings on which both intellect and imagination fly. These are places where imagination is prioritized, where publishing conventions are not imposed, and intellectual discourse can go hand in hand with play.

“Niche” cultural spaces like CABF are not luxuries; they are necessities. In Cairo, where mainstream cultural platforms are shaped by commercial pressures, state oversight, and a growing emphasis on spectacle, such curious spaces create room for work that is experimental, politically precarious, or simply uninterested in mass legibility. In contrast to the International Cairo Book Fair, local bookstores and mainstream publishers, CABF intentionally speaks to a relatively small audience. CABF may be unique to Cairo, but it exists within a global ecology of “niche” art book fairs structured within a typology of cultural symbols, conceptual norms, and aesthetic and linguistic systems that rely on visitors with prior exposure to similar spaces and publications. Art book fairs manipulate “nicheness” to create spatial experiences for creative, social, and intellectual activity beyond the mainstream demands of sanitization, censorship, and legibility. In this case, questions of access can be simplistic and non-exhaustive, as it is important to let in new visitors into these worlds, but equally important to protect the conditions that allow the fair to exist. However, as CABF continues to grow in popularity year after year, facing pressures to expand, gain greater visibility, and raise its prices, it becomes necessary to ask whether and how it navigates the tension between remaining a niche space and drifting toward the mainstream.

These spaces are also not without their limits. During a conversation with Saghi from Tehran Zine, also part of the public program, she spoke about the structural barriers Iranian artists face. Due to the strained political relationship between Egypt and Iran, many Iranian artists are unable to travel to Egypt to attend the fair. Beyond mobility, Saghi described the difficulty of publishing and circulating books without an ISBN within Iran, where informal publishing practices often face severe restrictions. CABF, in this sense, operates as both a site of access and a reminder of the uneven conditions under which art circulates globally. However, resisting these restrictions, CABF finds workarounds. Saghi tells me that in previous years, when no one from Tehran Zine could make it to the fair, they would ship the books to Cairo to be exhibited and sold at CABF’s collective table—a table set up to host publications collected by the CABF team from other small publishers and independent artists. For example, the fourth edition’s table featured a large number of publications that were put together as a collaboration between CABF and the Singapore Art Book Fair.

CABF also functions beyond temporal boundaries of the fair itself, extending into year-round networks of collaboration, exchange, and support. The founders Nour El Safoury and Marwa Ben Halim travel around the world to take part in different fairs, participating as book circulators themselves and expanding their network of artists and bookmakers. Many of the exhibitors who travelled to the fair in Cairo told me they had met either one of the founders at another fair somewhere else, revealing that this community of bookmakers is sustained through a transnational network that relies on relatively small-scale art book fairs to not only bring them together, but also to sustain their work. For many of these creatives, these fairs are the only place the public can encounter their work.

However, it is also impossible to look at CABF beyond the fabric of artistic and cultural events in Cairo. While many burgeoning art events are critical, thoughtfully crafted, and vital spaces for cultural and political work, there has been an increasing interest in art events as “experiences”, backed by real estate companies hoping to mark their visitors with taste and class. This reveals a greater danger to Cairo’s cultural scene, as it is undergoing active co-optation that effectively depoliticizes and drains it of its transformative potential. As the fair attracts thousands of visitors every year, it's important to position it within this larger sociocultural frame. This phenomena was brought to my attention a few days after the fair ended, when I was facilitating a workshop elsewhere in the city. During the break, one of the participants approached me in an agitated state. She told me she recognized me from the fair and wanted to “give her two cents.” She spoke about the confusion she felt around who the fair was intended for, and expressed her frustration with the increase in this year’s entry ticket—225 EGP for non-students—explaining that she believes that made it inaccessible to many people in her circles. Another person added that she was shocked to learn that the fair charged fees not only to visitors, but also to exhibitors. A third participant joined in, saying she couldn’t afford to bring her kids this year.

I didn’t have a satisfying response. I found myself immediately defensive, wanting to explain the material realities of organizing a fair of this scale in Cairo which refuses sponsorship from Big Evil Companies or major grant bodies. I wanted to tell them that kids and students get reduced entry tickets, that ticket proceeds sustain CABF’s work in Cairo and beyond in increasingly harder conditions, and that it helps improve the experience while paying everyone more fairly. I sat with their frustration. I couldn’t deny that the fair brought in visibly wealthier, English-speaking audiences. And although reduced-ticket options existed, I couldn’t deny their criticism that the fair catered to a very specific audience.

The conversation lingered with me long after it ended, forcing me to confront a contradiction at the heart of CABF: how a space committed to alternative publishing and radical imagination continues to operate within entrenched barriers of class and access. It is simultaneously a site of possibility and constraint, care and compromise, joy and precarity. The fair does not resolve the question of who gains access to experimental cultural work, but it renders that question visible. In this sense, the very presence of CABF reflects the absences that structure society more broadly. Its insistence on occupying a strategically “niche” position in Cairo, while at the same time gesturing toward the mainstream, offers a telling example of the spatial politics shaping the city’s contemporary art scene.

Cited works
Le Guin, Ursula. 2016. ‘The Operating Instructions’. In Words Are My Matter.

Mawadah Nofal is an Egyptian researcher, writer and artist interested in alternative knowledge production, history, and the politics of space. She is currently a fellow at the Zeitz Mocaa Museum in Cape Town. Her work has appeared in Dazed MENA, Rusted Radishes, RAWI, and Azl Magazine, among others. Mawadah holds an Msc in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology from the University of Oxford.