PARRAMATTA.- OPEN Architecture unveils its collaboration with Powerhouse Parramatta in Sydney, Australia, on the curatorial conception and exhibition design for Task Eternal, the landmark exhibition which will serve as the opening spectacle for the highly anticipated launch of Powerhouse Parramatta in late 2026. The construction of the exhibition has already begun. “Task Eternal will be one of the most ambitious aerospace exhibitions ever staged in the world to date,” said Powerhouse Chief Executive Lisa Havilah.

Representing the infinitude of the curatorial ambition within the finitude of the PS1 gallery has been simultaneously challenging and exciting to OPEN, a design office accustomed to taking on tasks that are less clearly defined but hold immense potential. On the one hand, the plethora of significant objects, newly commissioned works, and multinational, cross-disciplinary collaborations speaks of a boundless scope. On the other hand, the PS1 gallery, with its 18-meter height and more than 2,100 square meters of exhibition space, albeit enormous, is still too finite for the epic theme of Task Eternal. The sheer scale and scope of the exhibition effectively transform OPEN’s task into designing a museum within a museum.

Drawing on Ted Chiang’s science fiction The Tower of Babylon, which underlines the curatorial concept, OPEN’s design for the exhibition traces a linear journey structured like cinematic movements of acts and scenes. This unique experience unifies not only a constellation of exhibition themes, spaces, and objects, but also the dialectic between heaven and earth, and the positionality of humanity in the cosmos.

The linear path unfolds as an ascension, guiding the visitors to the apex for a moment of profound revelation, before returning them to where they began. Visitors, hopefully, will never feel the same again, with new insights and reflections through the journey.

In close collaboration with Powerhouse, OPEN developed the design through expansive explorations and dialogues with the museum’s team—curators, artists, scientists, and thinkers across disciplines. Given the exhibition’s intensely interdisciplinary nature and formidable scope of knowledge, the design process became its own encyclopedic journey of discovery and reflection, mirroring the very exhibition that it sought to stage.

“The exhibition is about almost everything that you could imagine relating to the space. To jam-pack all this ambition into a museum space is something very intriguing, and that really fits into our interests.” — LI Hu

"We are deeply involved in curatorial research and conception, and of course, the exhibition design itself. What interests us is that doing a project becomes a process of learning." — HUANG Wenjing