The Shanghai Biennale has revealed the theme of its 16th edition: LOUDER, a show about how music and popular culture shape the way people understand themselves and each other. The exhibition, curated by Ferran Barenblit, will open at the Power Station of Art in November 2027, returning as a centrepiece of Shanghai Art Week. Organisers announced the title on 11 November, while this year's art week is under way in the city.

At the centre of the concept is a question Barenblit put to journalists at a press conference in Shanghai: "What does it mean to speak louder today?" For the curator, the question covers both art's power to picture a different world and the struggle for certain voices to be heard at all. The biennale will look at popular culture's contradictions — its capacity to build community and belonging, and its parallel role in exclusion, homogenisation and social control.

The framework ranges widely, taking in rock, punk, hip hop, electronic music and C-pop, alongside fashion, fandoms and digital platforms, drawing on commercial and underground scenes alike. But Barenblit was clear that the show will not simply be about music. Instead, he described music as an entry point into bigger questions: how communities form, how desires circulate, and how cultural expression can either challenge or reinforce the hierarchies around it. A song need not name identity or authority directly to engage with either, he suggested; meaning can surface through a gesture, a dance or a way of gathering.

The theme builds on Barenblit's own history with punk and politics. As director of Madrid's Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, he programmed exhibitions including Sonic Youth etc.: Sensational Fix in 2010 and Punk. Its Traces in Contemporary Art in 2015, before leading Barcelona's Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona from 2015 to 2021. LOUDER also reaches further back, connecting the historical avant-garde, the Situationists and Fluxus with today's popular culture, and citing American critic Greil Marcus. One touchstone Barenblit named is Jeremy Deller's Acid Brass (1997), in which a traditional British brass band played acid house and techno.