Kathmandu Triennale 2026 Names Artistic Directors

Conversation Cosmin Costinas: A Walk Through the Kathmandu Triennale Stephanie Bailey

Siddhartha Arts Foundation and Kathmandu Triennale have appointed Sujan Chitrakar and Natalie King as Artistic Directors of the fifth Kathmandu Triennale, which opens in February 2026.

In a statement, the Triennale’s organisers said the pairing was made ‘in acknowledgement of Chitrakar’s distinctive local perspective within the unique habitat and vantage point of Kathmandu alongside King’s international experience’.

Chitrakar is an artist and academic at Kathmandu University. He was one of the curators of Photo Kathmandu and helped organise the Kathmandu International Art Festival in 2009 and 2012 before it was renamed the Kathmandu Triennale.

King is Enterprise Professor of Visual Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. She has curated Yuki Kihara‘s New Zealand Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale and Tracey Moffatt‘s Australian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, among many other exhibitions.

Chitrakar and King’s exhibition will explore coexistence, which the Triennale described as ‘kinship among all beings, peoples, cultures, ecologies, faiths, and thoughts.’

Questions the exhibition posits include: ‘how can we hear each other amidst the cacophony of distractions and within a world of tumult and uncertainty?’ and ‘what is the role of tenderness, intimacy and hope?’

The previous edition of the Kathmandu Triennale in 2022 discussed decolonisation, migration, and displacement.

‘The Triennale is positioned in the context of Nepal, where the core conversation has been about how to establish a federal nation of different communities,’ Artistic Director Cosmin Costinas told Ocula in 2022.

‘So there was nothing radical about our proposition. It was more about trying to really understand the implications of major discussions that were already happening in the Nepali context, and to do it from the perspective of art.’ —[O]

Main image: Seema Sharmah Shah, Shakti Svaroopa-3 (2019) (detail). Unique print. Courtesy the artist.