The inaugural ARTRA Global Talk invited artists, curators, and arts professionals to share, exchange, and innovate ideas. It particularly focused on meetings, encounters, and, more significantly, generative interactions between visual arts and performing arts. It was designed as a platform to provoke discussions and new understandings in a trans-disciplinary context. At the same time, it re-examined the ways in which arts can reinvent the past for the present and future, translate the local to the global, and contribute to the creativity, sustainability, and mobility of urban culture.

The half-day Forum consisted of two panel discussions designed to bring together colleagues from a variety of disciplines, including practitioners in visual arts, music, dance, and drama, as well as directors, producers, and policy makers from arts festivals and biennial institutions. Shanghai, popularly known as the "Magical Metropolis" (Modu), is celebrated for its diversity, richness, and inclusiveness. As the birthplace of the pioneering ARTRA initiative, the city provided fertile ground for a new arts brand driven by innovation and exploration.