Powerhouse Parramatta Takes Visitors To The Stars In $18M Opening Exhibition

Powerhouse has today announced the inaugural exhibition for the highly anticipated Powerhouse Parramatta, in one of the most ambitious aerospace exhibitions ever staged worldwide.

Titled Task Eternal, the exhibition traces humanity’s enduring quest to defy gravity and journey into the vast unknown of space, presented in a room of more than 2,200 square metres, with a ceiling height of 18-metres.

Developed over four years with international and local collaborators, including the Australian Space Agency and other international agencies such as the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum alongside artists, researchers, First Nations communities, and industry leaders, the exhibition represents a significant international exhibition and major statement of cultural, scientific and creative collaboration.

“Powerhouse Parramatta is the largest investment into cultural infrastructure since the Sydney Opera House over 50 years ago,” said NSW Minister for the Arts John Graham.

“Task Eternal is more than an exhibition — it’s a symbol of the placement of Western Sydney at the forefront of Australia’s cultural, scientific and technological future, a place of innovation and diversity.”

Developed in partnership with acclaimed Beijing-based husband and wife duo Li Hu and Huang Wenjing of OPEN Architecture, the exhibition draws inspiration from Ted Chiang’s science fiction short story  The Tower of Babylon, which sees an ancient civilisation from a flat Earth spend hundreds of years building a tower to reach God. Chiang has also been commissioned to write an essay specially for the exhibition.

Visitors will ascend a six-story tower taking them through four acts of humanity’s journey of space travel- Skyward, Power, Off-Earth and The Return, with an immersive work from American artist James Turrell at the summit, immersing viewers in room of shifting fields of light and colour.

Foregrounded in Task Eternal are the Aboriginal sky stories and knowledge systems that have guided navigation, timekeeping and culture since time immemorial, with one of the world’s earliest returning flight technologies, the boomerang, anchoring the exhibition’s curatorial framework.

Senior Yolŋu artist Naminapu Maymuru-White, whose work draws on the Yolŋu cosmology of Milŋiyawuy, a celestial river of stars that binds Earth and sky, will present a major installation featuring 10 Larrakiti- memorial poles- recently acquired into the Powerhouse Collection.

Hundreds of objects from around the world brought together in Australia

The exhibition includes more than 600 objects on loan from leading local and international science and cultural institutions, including a prototype of the  Roo-ver, the rover being developed by ELO_² for a mission to the Moon with the Australian Space Agency; The Kosmosuit, a next generation ‘smart’ spacesuit developed by Australian start-up Metakosmos; and Australian astronaut Katherine Bennell-Pegg’s spacesuit, on public display for the first time.

Some of the Powerhouse Museum’s most significant aeronautical and space-related artefacts will also feature, such as items from pioneering Australian inventor Lawrence Hargrave; an F1 Rocket engine, the most powerful ever built at the time; a Skylark Rocket launched from Woomera and a 1914 Bleriot XI monoplane, one of the world’s earliest aircraft.

“From the vantage point of the southern hemisphere, Task Eternal uses the motif of flight to investigate the technological, political, cultural and environmental motivations – and impacts – of leaving the ground, connecting it with individual personal stories of connecting with the sky across countries and generations,” said Powerhouse Chief Executive Lisa Havilah.

Sources have told the Sydney Morning Herald the exhibition will cost at least $18 million, more than 35 per cent of the opening program’s budget.

Public Service Association (PSA) Assistant General Secretary Troy Wright criticised the timing of the announcement, with staff from the Art Gallery of NSW this week expected to learn the outcomes of consultations on the loss of dozens of jobs.

“In the same week as we learn about the $18 million cost of one of the five shows which will open the $1 billion Powerhouse Museum this time next year, 51 people at The Art Gallery of NSW will be told to clear their desks and head down to Centrelink,” he said.

“This is robbing Peter to pay Paul stuff. A real kick in the guts to staff at the Art Gallery of NSW.”

Task Eternal will open with Powerhouse Parramatta, expected in late 2026.