Ferran Barenblit Appointed Chief Curator of The 16th Shanghai Biennale

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. On July 1, an announcement named Argentinian curator Ferran Barenblit as the chief curator of the 16th edition of the Shanghai Art Biennale. The biennale, which is a member of the International Biennial Association (IBA), and among the most influential art exhibitions in Asia, is set to open in November 2027 at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai’s Huangpu district. Barenblit succeeds Kitty Scott, who curated the 15th edition titled Does the flower hear the bee?, which focused on differing nonhuman and human models of intelligence and featured over 250 works by 67 individual artists and collectives. Born in Buenos Aires in 1968, Barenblit has over three decades of curatorial experience and is currently based in Barcelona. He has served as director of the MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and Centre d’Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona. He was also the founding director of CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid, and worked at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York under its late founder Marcia Tucker. More recently, Barenblit curated the 16th Cuenca Biennial in Ecuador, which reflected on democracy and the conflicts of the contemporary era, with an emphasis on the nations of Latin America. The biennale comprised 31 projects of which 6 were Ecuadorian. For the 16th Shanghai Art Biennale, Barenblit said in a press statement that he believes the 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.” He added that the ambition behind this edition “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.”