Argentinian curator Ferran Barenblit has been named the chief curator of the 16th Shanghai Biennale, set to open in November 2027.
Selected by a committee organised by the biennale’s host institution, Power Station of Art, Barenblit was formerly Director of MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona from 2015 to 2021. Prior to that he served the founding director of CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid, and Director of Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona.
The biennale asks ‘how contemporary art can give form to the forces that organize life today’, Barenblit says in a statement. ‘Those forces are not abstract. They are present in the ways people observe reality, imagine themselves, and project possible futures. Art does not merely represent these conditions. It can slow them down, displace them, intensify them, and make them available to thought.’
The edition will aim to ‘create a situation in which art generates encounters between local histories and international conversations, between critical thought and lived experience, between what is already visible and what has not yet found a form.’
