The 16th Shanghai Biennale Announces Its Title: LOUDER

SHANGHAI, Nov. 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The Power Station of Art (PSA) will present the 16th Shanghai Biennale in November 2027, curated by Ferran Barenblit. Titled LOUDER, the Biennale will explore how popular culture shapes our identities, our sense of belonging, and the way we perceive the world. Music plays a particularly important role in this process, offering a space for identification, shared experience, and the production of imaginaries. Fashion, images, scenes, fandoms, media, and digital platforms also shape contemporary culture, generating new affects, desires, languages, and forms of collective recognition.

Today, images, sounds, messages, and stimuli compete constantly for our attention, while identities are constructed and negotiated within cultural networks that are increasingly fast-moving, global, and fragmented. Popular culture can create community and emancipation, but also exclusion, homogenization, and new forms of control. To speak louder means both to raise the volume and to ask what becomes visible and audible, what cuts through the noise, and what remains outside our perception. LOUDER will explore how the visual arts perceive, interpret, and rework these contradictions, and how art can intervene in economies of attention, alter their hierarchies, and propose other ways of listening, looking, relating to one another, and imagining collectively.

Conceived from Shanghai, a city defined by the intensity of its cultural, technological, and urban transformations, LOUDER will develop over the coming year as an open process. Artists, curators, and a range of interlocutors will gradually shape a Biennale that engages with contemporary culture from within its contradictions, rhythms, and forces.

For full details, please visit PSA's official website: https://www.powerstationofart.com/whats-on/news/16-shb-title-louder

About the Chief Curator

Ferran Barenblit (Buenos Aires, 1968) is a Barcelona-based curator whose career spans curatorial practice and museum leadership. He studied Art History at the University of Barcelona and Museum Studies at New York University. 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, helping shape the institution from its inception, and Director of Centre d'Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona. Throughout his career, his work has explored the social, cultural, and historical forces that shape contemporary life.