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Ferran Barenblit to direct the 16th Shanghai Biennale
Ferran Barenblit has been appointed chief curator of the 16th Shanghai Biennale, one of the major international platforms for contemporary art in Asia, whose next edition will open in November 2027 at the Power Station of Art (PSA), the institution that has organized the event since 2012.
With this appointment, the Spanish curator adds another milestone to an international career that has placed him at the helm of some of the country's leading art institutions. Barenblit was director of the MACBA in Barcelona between 2015 and 2021, after having founded and led the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) in Móstoles and previously directed the Centre d'Arts Santa Mònica in Barcelona.
The Shanghai Biennale, established in 1996, was China's first international biennial of contemporary art and remains the country's longest-running. For nearly three decades, it has become a major event on the international art calendar and a forum for reflecting on the cultural and social transformations of the contemporary world.
For this new edition, Barenblit proposes rethinking the traditional curatorial model of biennials. His approach seeks to shift the focus from a grand central theme to the relationships established between the artworks, the artists, the public, and the historical and social contexts in which they are produced. As the curator himself explained, the Biennial aspires to be "demanding and legible, accessible and complex," capable of addressing diverse audiences without relinquishing art's capacity to resist oversimplification.
Barenblit also stated that his goal is to transform the Biennial into a space where art fosters encounters between local histories and international debates, between critical thinking and everyday experience, and between what is already visible and what has yet to find a way to manifest itself.
The Power Station of Art has emphasized that this edition will seek to break with the traditional thematic scheme that has characterized many international biennials, opting for a more open and flexible format, in which the dialogue between the works takes on greater relevance than the construction of a single discourse.
The proposal connects with previous experiences both inside and outside Shanghai. In the 2018 edition, Mexican artist Cuauhtémoc Medina already questioned the thematic unity of major international exhibitions, while that same year Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro organized the São Paulo Biennial based on several exhibition projects conceived by artists, prioritizing creative processes and affinities between works over a common narrative.
Barenblit has also developed this curatorial approach in recent projects. In 2023, he was the chief curator of the 16th Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador), titled Perhaps Tomorrow , where he brought together 31 projects focused on the challenges of democracy and contemporary conflicts, with a special attention to the Latin American context. That exhibition conceived of art as a space of uncertainty, open questions, and shared reflection, rather than as a place to offer definitive answers.
Her appointment as head of the Shanghai Biennale comes just weeks after her name was among the leading candidates to take over as director of the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona. Ultimately, the institution's board of trustees chose Maribel López, until now director of ARCOmadrid, for that position, thus concluding one of the most significant renewal processes in the Spanish art scene in recent months.
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