Title and date
The Power Station of Art said the 16th Shanghai Biennale will be held in November 2027 and will carry the title LOUDER. The museum named Ferran Barenblit as its curator.
What the edition will examine
According to the museum, the Biennale will look at the ways popular culture shapes identities, a sense of belonging and how people perceive the world. It said music holds a particularly large place in that process, as a space for identification, shared experience and the production of imaginaries, and that fashion, images, scenes, fandoms, media and digital platforms also shape contemporary culture.
The museum said the edition will address both sides of that culture: the community and emancipation it can create, and the exclusion, homogenization and new forms of control it can also bring. The title, it said, refers both to raising the volume and to asking what becomes visible and audible, what cuts through the noise, and what remains outside perception.
A Biennale built over the year ahead
The museum said the edition will develop over the coming year as an open process, with artists, curators and other interlocutors gradually shaping it rather than receiving a fixed programme. It said the Biennale is conceived from Shanghai, a city it describes through the intensity of its cultural, technological and urban transformations. Full details are on the museum's website.
The curator
Barenblit, born in Buenos Aires in 1968, is based in Barcelona. He studied art history at the University of Barcelona and museum studies at New York University, and was director of MACBA, the Barcelona contemporary art museum, from 2015 to 2021. He was previously founding director of CA2M in Madrid and director of the Centre d'Art Santa Monica in Barcelona.