Powerhouse Parramatta, a $915 million museum designed by Moreau Kusunoki and Genton, opened with five exhibitions showcasing art, design, and technology alongside interactive experiences.
The building's steel exoskeleton structure features glass walls that bring natural light into the galleries. One opening exhibition, Overflow, displays films by Kamilaroi filmmaker Ivan Sen showing seven First Nations communities in New South Wales caring for their country. The installation includes a shallow replica tidal pool that rises and falls with the Parramatta River's tides, allowing visitors to wade into the exhibit.
The Dark, an exhibition for children, draws primarily from the museum's permanent collection. It features minerals and precious stones with stories about their discoverers, alongside historical pieces like mechanical birds and a transparent anatomical figure. Visitors are asked to leave smartphones outside before entering. Local children contributed personal items to displays, integrating community engagement into the curation.
The Mall celebrates shopping mall design and culture, displaying arcade window displays, the original Parramall neon sign, and David Jones archive materials including mid-20th century advertising posters. Photographers Jo Duck and Bahram Mia created a commissioned series of portraits showing people who work and socialize in contemporary malls.
Task Eternal explores flight from a Burramattagal boomerang on loan from the British Museum to lunar exploration machines. Leonardo da Vinci sketches sit alongside drawings by Australian aviation pioneer Lawrence Hargrave. The exhibition includes an Apollo space capsule, aircraft, rockets, Voyager spacecraft messages, and space suits from science fiction films. One digital display shows how light pollution from space junk has degraded night skies.
British artist and designer Es Devlin's exhibition, The Turning, includes Forest of Us, a mirror maze entered after viewing a film on organic symmetry. Memory Palace presents a 3D-printed imaginary city citing anthropologist Margaret Mead's words about social change, with audio narration referencing sites including where Rosa Parks waited and the Block at Redfern, an Australian First Nations activism site. A separate installation invites visitors to draw strangers opposite them for 15 minutes without speaking, titled Collective Portrait. On the Powerhouse lawn, Devlin's drawings of 244 endangered local species form an egg-shaped stage backdrop for performances of Come Home Again, scheduled Thursday to Sunday during November at dusk.
Powerhouse Parramatta opens daily 10am-5pm and until 9pm Thursday-Sunday during its opening festival in November. Entry is free.