Siddhartha Arts Foundation and Kathmandu Triennale are pleased to announce the appointment of Sujan Chitrakar and Natalie King as Artistic Directors of Kathmandu Triennale in February 2026.
Artistic Directors Sujan Chitrakar and Natalie King have been appointed as a collaborative duo in acknowledgement of Chitrakar’s distinctive local perspective within the unique habitat and vantage point of Kathmandu alongside King’s international experience from the Global South. Together, they will forge new alignments and symmetries of understanding taking inspiration from Nepal’s co-location within South Asia.
The theme of Kathmandu Triennale 2026 explores Coexistence—kinship among all beings, peoples, cultures, ecologies, faiths and thoughts. It will inspire us to embrace diverse ways of relating and living, of perceiving and making, both as a society and as individuals engaged in mutual responsibility. Searching for avenues to transcend boundaries and repair a precarious world, Coexistence seeks a newfound intimacy amongst us all, a yearning for belonging that speaks to a global ethics of connection and coexistence, care and kinship.
Furthermore, the curatorial concept delves into a set of propositions: How can we hear each other amidst the cacophony of distractions and within a world of tumult and uncertainty? How can we convene, confer, and coexist as a collective community? What can local ecologies and communities tell us? How can ancestral and indigenous practices shape our collective understanding of each other and our habitat? What is the role of tenderness, intimacy and hope? How can we imagine the world we want and contribute to a vision of coexistence?
Organised by Siddhartha Arts Foundation and now in its fifth edition, the Kathmandu Triennale is Nepal’s premier international platform for contemporary art, with a mission to promote Nepali arts and culture and to establish Kathmandu as an international hub for the arts. The Triennale began as the pioneering Kathmandu International Art Festival, which set critical precedents during both editions in 2009 and 2012, exploring questions around the status of women and climate change. In 2017, the Festival converted into the Triennale format, with an exhibition exploring the city as a locus for creativity whilst 2022 was informed by discourses of decolonisation, migration and displacement.
Sujan Chitrakar is a Kathmandu-based artist, art educator, and curator working as Associate Professor at Kathmandu University. His works deal with the intricate subtleties of shared human experiences. As an educator, he has nurtured some of today’s most important Nepali emerging, contemporary artists as their mentor at Kathmandu University Art+Design. He played instrumental roles in supporting both editions of the Kathmandu International Art Festivals, which were precursors to the Kathmandu Triennale. He was also a member of the curatorial team of Photo Kathmandu.
Natalie King is an Australian curator and Enterprise Professor of Visual Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. She was the Curator of Yuki Kihara: Paradise Camp, Aotearoa New Zealand at the 59th Venice Biennale 2022 and Powerhouse Museum, Sydney 2023. In 2017, King was Curator of Tracey Moffatt: My Horizon, Australian Pavilion, the 57th Venice Art Biennale. She has curated exhibitions for the Singapore Art Museum; Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo; National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan. In 2020, King was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for “service to the contemporary visual arts”. She is President of AICA-Australia (International Association of Art Critics, Paris).