Ferran Barenblit appointed Chief Curator of the 16th Shanghai Biennale
The Power Station of Art announced that, following the careful deliberation of its Fourth Academic Committee, Ferran Barenblit has been appointed Chief Curator of the 16th Shanghai Biennale, which will open in November 2027.
Ferran Barenblit is a Barcelona-based curator whose career spans museum leadership and curatorial practice. From 2015 to 2021, he served as Director of MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Previously, he was the founding director of CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid, where he helped shape the institution from its inception, and Director of Centre d'Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona. Throughout his career, his work has consistently engaged with the social, cultural, and historical forces that shape contemporary life. He believes that art is one of the places where societies test their conflicts, desires, imaginaries, and possible futures. Leveraging his extensive experience in curation and exhibition organizing, Barenblit will rethink and break through the traditional thematic curation model of biennales, returning art to a resilient state of oscillation and offering audiences a more open exhibition viewing experience.
Ferran Barenblit says: “The 16th Shanghai Biennale enters a genealogy shaped by successive editions, asking how contemporary art can give form to the forces that organize life today. 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. We live in a world composed of images, sounds and systems of attention that are part of our experience, but often remain invisible precisely because they are so close to us. The 16th Shanghai Biennale should belong fully to the field of contemporary art without closing itself inside it. It should be demanding and legible, accessible and complex, capable of addressing broad publics while preserving art’s power to resist simplification. Its ambition is 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.”
Ferran Barenblit (Buenos Aires, 1968) studied Art History at the University of Barcelona and Museum Studies at New York University. Across a career spanning two continents, Ferran Barenblit has combined artistic ambition, critical research, institutional development, and close collaboration with artists and communities.
Launched in 1996, the Shanghai Biennale is the longest-running international contemporary art biennale in China and one of the most influential contemporary art events worldwide.
Since 2012, PSA has served as the organizing institution of the Shanghai Biennale. In 2014, it introduced the Academic Committee system, emphasizing academic depth and critical inquiry. The Shanghai Biennale has since evolved into an interdisciplinary platform that confronts global complexities and boldly challenges the boundaries of human thought and perception.
Main Image: Ferran Barenblit. Photo: Leo de Blas.