Kathmandu Triennale

The Kathmandu Triennale originated as the Kathmandu International Art Festival (KIAF), founded in 2009 by Sangeeta Thapa, the Nepali curator and Director of the Siddhartha Art Gallery (founded 1987), and the Siddhartha Arts Foundation as an institutional response to Nepal's position within the South Asian contemporary art conversation. The Festival was rebranded as the Kathmandu Triennale for its 2017 edition. By the late 2000s, the post-1990s South Asian contemporary art conversation had institutional infrastructure across India (the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, founded 2012; the Mumbai gallery infrastructure), Bangladesh (the Dhaka Art Summit, founded 2012; the Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh, founded 1981), Pakistan (the Karachi Biennale, founded 2017; the Lahore Biennale, founded 2018), and Sri Lanka (the Colombo Art Biennale, founded 2009). Nepal — a Himalayan kingdom-then-republic, cultural-historical anchor of the South Asian Buddhist and Hindu traditions, post-1990 democratic transition and post-2008 republic — lacked the international contemporary art institutional anchor that its cultural-historical position warranted. The Kathmandu International Art Festival, and the Triennale it became, was conceived as the institutional correction.

The 1st Kathmandu International Art Festival (2009), curated by Thapa, opened across the Patan Museum, Siddhartha Art Gallery, and other Kathmandu Valley venues with a focus on Nepali and pan-South-Asian contemporary art. The 2nd Festival (2012) extended the institutional reach into international curatorial engagement. The April 2015 Gorkha earthquake — the magnitude-7.8 earthquake that killed approximately 9,000 people, injured more than 22,000, and destroyed portions of the Kathmandu Valley's UNESCO World Heritage architectural infrastructure, including portions of the Durbar Squares of Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur — reshaped the institutional conditions within which the Festival operated and contributed to its restructuring.

The first edition under the Triennale name (KT2017, the third edition of the broader series including the 2009 and 2012 Festivals), curated by Philippe Van Cauteren (Artistic Director of S.M.A.K., Ghent), opened on 24 March 2017 under the title The City, My Studio / The City, My Life, with Francis Alÿs as patron artist. Van Cauteren's curatorial work engaged the post-earthquake reconstruction of the Kathmandu Valley as the substantive subject of the biennial's curatorial argument, with commissioned work by international artists alongside the Nepali contemporary art generation. KT2017 established the post-earthquake institutional model and extended the triennial's international institutional reading.

KT2077 — titled by reference to the Nepali Vikram Samvat calendar (2077 BS corresponds to 2020 CE, the originally scheduled year before Covid-19 forced postponement to 11 February – 31 March 2022) — was held under the theme Connecting the Dots. Cosmin Costinaș (then Executive Director of Para Site, Hong Kong) was Artistic Director; the Nepali artists Sheelasha Rajbhandari and Hit Man Gurung were co-curators; and Sharareh Bajracharya was Director. The KT2077 curatorial work engaged questions of migration, displacement, colonial legacies, and the decolonisation of art. The edition confirmed the institutional position of the Kathmandu Triennale as the anchor of the Himalayan contemporary art conversation.

The fifth Kathmandu Triennale has been formally announced for February 2026 under the theme Coexistence, Kinship, and Care, jointly organised by the Siddhartha Arts Foundation and the Nepal Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), with Artistic Directors Natalie King (Melbourne-based independent curator) and Sujan Chitrakar (Nepali artist and academic) selecting approximately forty artists across the Nepal Art Council, Patan Museum, Siddhartha Art Gallery and partner venues. The NAFA–SAF partnership, formalised in December 2023, marks a structural development for an institution that had operated for fifteen years primarily through SAF and international cultural-cooperation support. The Nepali contemporary art generation has continued to develop international standing in parallel — most prominently through Nepal's inaugural Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) by Tsherin Sherpa, with support from the Rubin Museum. The continuing structural question is whether the new NAFA-SAF model can sustain the institutional ambitions of the Costinaș-era edition across post-pandemic Nepali political-economic conditions.

The institutional architecture

The Kathmandu Triennale is organised by the Siddhartha Arts Foundation, a non-profit cultural foundation founded in 2007 by Sangeeta Thapa and the Siddhartha Art Gallery family. Continuing institutional support comes from international cultural-cooperation organisations (Pro Helvetia, the Goethe-Institut, the Embassy of Switzerland in Nepal, Mondriaan Fund), Nepali corporate and private philanthropic partners, and individual patron support. The Triennale operates across the Patan Museum, the Nepal Art Council, the Patan Durbar Square area, the Bahadur Shah Baithak, and network of Kathmandu Valley cultural venues.