Offering a dynamic and diverse snapshot of contemporary culture today through the work of nearly 100 artists and collectives from 35 countries, the 2026 NGV Triennial has revealed the line-up for the fourth edition of the National Gallery of Victoria’s blockbuster exhibition, opening 13 December.
Traversing all levels of NGV International, this blockbuster exhibition features more than 80 projects, including 25 world-premiere commissions and 70+ entering the NGV Collection. These include a newly commissioned sculpture by Zanele Muholi (South Africa), a never-before-seen installation of photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans (Germany), and a larger-than-life participatory chess set by Louise Paramor.
The exhibition features important work by international artists and designers including Jenny Holzer (USA), Sarah Sze (USA), Shilpa Gupta (India), Mika Rottenberg (Argentina), Martine Syms (USA), Pamela Rosenkranz (Switzerland), Wu Tsang (USA), Rachel Kneebone (UK), Christine Sun Kim (USA), Frida Escobedo (Mexico), Wendy Red Star (USA), Kent Monkman (Canada) and Ocean Vuong (Vietnam), alongside leading Australian practitioners including Christian Thompson, Angelina Karadada Boona and Juan Ford.
Across the exhibition, artists and designers explore transformation in its many forms – material, cultural, technological, personal, political and societal – offering new ways of seeing and understanding the world around us.
The exhibition opens with two major site-specific works that transform NGV International’s Forecourt and Waterwall. Wunambal Gaambera/Worrora artist Angelina Karadada Boona will realise her most ambitious work to date: her signature Wandjina figure reimagined in glowing light for NGV International’s iconic Waterwall.
Wandjina are powerful ancestral beings that live in the clouds and are responsible for bringing the wunju (monsoon) rain. Represented with owl-like eyes and a halo intended to reflect lightning and storm clouds, Karadada Boona’s world-premiere Wandjina installation will rise up across the Waterwall and convey a reminder of one’s impact on Country.
Commissioned by the City of Melbourne in partnership with NGV, Lebanese-French artist Najla El Zein’s world premiere new work will take the form of a major outdoor sculpture designed for public gatherings. The carved and contoured limestone forms encourage audiences to sit, touch, rest, recline, gather and play.
Made from stone quarried from a mountain outside Beirut, the work was carved in Beirut by master artisans from Lebanon and the region. Presented on the NGV Forecourt, the sculpture is an invitation to connect within a shared space.
Major exhibition highlights include a series of large-scale sculptures and installations that bring together ambitious scale, material innovation and extraordinary craftsmanship. For NGV International’s Federation Court, Pamela Rosenkranz will create a new iteration of her 7.5 metre sculpture Old Tree, 2023, originally commissioned for New York’s public art park, the High Line. Embodying the ancient ‘tree of life’ motif, the vivid pink hues of the sculpture emphasises humanity’s relationship with nature.
The exhibition also features several major works which explore how we read, interpret and understand the world, including Jenny Holzer’s kinetic sculpture WTF, 2022. Comprising a suspended and swinging LED sign, the work displays online posts by a conspiracy theorist and tweets from United States President Donald Trump during his first term. The work slides along a track in an unpredictable rhythm that echoes the chaotic patterns of digital conversation.
For the 2026 NGV Triennial, German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans will create a never-before-seen installation of images titled Love Life Installation (1989-2022). Comprising twenty-five photographs at varying scales, this whole-room installation brings together large abstractions, intimate portraits, club scenes and still life images in a single composition. Here the themes that have shaped Tillmans’ practice over time – community, desire, fragility, protest and the material conditions of being – are distilled into a unique spatial experience.
Though internationally recognised and decorated for photography, Zanele Muholi has recently expanded their practice into large-scale sculptures. Muholi’s monumental 3.3 metre sculpture Umkhuseli (The Protector), 2025, on display in the Triennial, depicts the artist as the Virgin Mary, offering a powerful commentary on gender-based injustice while also calling for greater empathy for all.
In Shilpa Gupta’s Words come from ears, a flap board, typically used to display train departure information, presents fragmented words and phrases. The poetic messages are programmed to include mistakes, typos and missing letters, prompting the viewer to create another layer of meaning to the work by mentally filling in the omissions. The rhythmic flipping of the panels generates a compelling soundscape, adding a distinctive tonal quality to the work’s poetic ‘voice’.
For the NGV Triennial, Chinar Farooqui (India) will create a contemporary interpretation of a traditional Mughal tent, traditionally used as temporary royal encampments. The work will celebrate chikankari, the delicate white on-white ‘shadow’ embroidery that emerged in Lucknow during the Mughal period. Embroidered across diaphanous muslin, chikankari carries within it the intimacy of domestic practice – an art form historically sustained by women, stitched into the rhythms of everyday life in Uttar Pradesh.
Offering a poignant reflection on our media-saturated world, Sarah Sze’s Slow dance, 2024, is a sculptural and video installation comprising a 14-minute cycle of videos – footage of animals, nature, and human-made objects – projected onto hundreds of pieces of torn paper.
The suspended paper ‘screens’ are tethered to the ground by everyday objects collected from the artist’s studio and surrounds. Breaking with established conventions of both video and sculpture, Slow dance offers a poignant and meditative reflection on the complex relationship between two-dimensional images and three-dimensional objects in today’s image-saturated world.
States of Mind, 2026, is a world-premiere wall mural by Christine Sun Kim that continues the artist’s practice of translating American Sign Language into visual graphic form. Sun Kim’s mural gives physical presence to ASL phrases relating to the mind – such as ‘mind gone’, expressing the idea of being jetlagged or otherwise absent minded. The black masses of her mural act as an expansive ‘mind-map’ that stretches along Coles Court.
Martine Syms presents her recent trilogy of videos, Sicks or Act I, Steven or Act II, and Ate or Act III (2023). Presented on bespoke sculptural screens within a striking colour saturated environment, these filmic collages draw from television, the internet, social media and footage produced by phones and CCTV to address how representations of gender and Black identity are formed within image and language systems.
In a moment when AI is radically altering our media landscape, New Zealand photographer Yvonne Todd’s most ambitious photographic work to date, Personators will echo the way that AI collects data to inform its outputs. Hundreds of images from a range of non-digital sources – such as 1970s fashion magazine spreads, Victorian Pictorialist photographs, fashion editorials and wedding photography – will immerse the entire gallery space in a world of uncanny imagery.
The exhibition also features several participatory works that invite visitors to learn, interact and play. In the Great Hall, Melbourne-based artist Louise Paramor will create thirty-two human height chess pieces, each realised in the artist’s signature sculptural language of primary-coloured anthropomorphic forms. Visitors are invited to participate in chess games and competitions throughout the exhibition period.
Wendy Red Star’s new commission draws on the histories, archives and lived knowledge of the Apsáalooke Nation. The artist will take over the NGV’s Gallery Kitchen with a multi-media installation, developed with Deakin Motion Lab, that transforms colonial-era landscape paintings from the NGV Collection into an animated, interactive world. Audience members are invited to ‘enter’ the artwork where they are transformed into an invasive animal, revealing the ongoing ecological impact of colonisation on Victoria’s unique ecosystems.
Mika Rottenberg’s three channel video Spaghetti Blockchain, 2019 takes its name from a sculptural element within the video itself – a blockchain-like structure made of raw spaghetti, held together by nodes of marshmallows. Drawing on sources as varied as from Tuvan throat singing to the large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the video explores how energies and objects circulate and transform across states of matter, reflecting on the incessant creation, distribution and consumption of materials that defines contemporary life.
For younger audiences, Mika Rottenberg will also take over the NGV’s children’s gallery with the exhibition Squish, Twist, Fizz. The exhibition features Cosmic Generator, 2017, a video work that travels through brightly lit underground tunnels, marketplaces and communities along the border between Mexico and the United States.
Extending beyond the screen, the exhibition invites children into a hands-on environment inspired by the film’s textures, colours and movement, where they can draw, play and make sculptures from plastic waste collected from the streets of New York City.
Also on display is the interactive work The birds, 2026, by Benedikte Bjerre (Denmark), in which a large gallery space is populated by foil inflatable penguins filled with helium. Visitors are invited to navigate the crowd of penguins and interact with the work, picking up the penguins before watching them slowly float back to the ground. Taking its title from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic horror film, the work is a commentary on the destruction of the penguins’ natural habitat as the climate crisis continues.
“Every three years, the NGV Triennial gives audiences the chance to reflect on our rapidly changing lives and culture through the work of some of the globe’s leading practitioners. Through art and design, the Triennial presents an opportunity to learn, understand and contemplate a world in flux, as well as our place within it,” said Director of the NGV, Tony Ellwood AM.
“With 25 world-premiere commissions and over 70 projects entering the NGV Collection, the NGV Triennial stands as a testament to our incredibly generous network of philanthropic donors. Without their passion for sharing contemporary art and design with all Victorians, we wouldn’t be able to stage an exhibition of this calibre, nor would we be able to build and preserve a collection for the enjoyment of future generations,” said Ellwood.
Launched in 2017 and held every three years since, the NGV Triennial is a FREE gallery-wide exhibition of contemporary art, design, architecture and fashion. The inaugural exhibition in 2017 is the NGV’s most attended exhibition in history and was visited by more than 1.23 million people, with a daily average attendance in excess of 10,000 people. In 2023, the third edition of the NGV Triennial welcomed more than 1 million visitors.
The NGV Triennial will be on display at NGV International from 13 December 2026 – 11 April 2027. For more information, visit: www.ngv.melbourne for details.
Images: Benedikte Bjerre, The Birds, 2017 – photo by Gabriele Abbruzzese | Jose Dávila, Los Límites de lo Posible, 2019 – photo © María Rincón | Pamela Rosenkranz, Old Tree, 2023. A High Line Plinth commission – photo of Timothy Schenck. Courtesy of the High Line | Shilpa Gupta, Words came from ears, 2018 | Christine Sun Kim, Minds Clash, 2025 – photo © Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Hyundai (Seoul) | Louise Paramor, Maquettes for Chess Set, 2026 – photo by Christian Capurro | Mika Rottenberg, Cosmic Generator, 2017, still © Mika Rottenberg. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth