Country Always

Caring for Country

A Corner of the Empire

The Garden Palace

The Holding Pen

The Agricultural Hall

Regional Networks

Across New South Wales

A Museum of Doing

Technological Museum

Expanding Stories

Evolution of the Castle Hill site from botanical research station to Museum Discovery Centre

Transforming the Tramsheds

Powerhouse Stage 1 and the Harwood Building

A Symbol in Time

Sydney Observatory

Ongoing Transformations

Powerhouse Ultimo

Applied Arts and Sciences

Defining the terms in the 21st century

Powerhouse Renewal

A transformative renewal program across four sites

We Rise

Blak Powerhouse

Powerhouse-1 Mission Launch to the ISS

An initiative of the Powerhouse: Future Space program

2024

Exoskeleton

Powerhouse Parramatta

Sydney Design Week

Across Sydney12—24 Sep

2023

Program Sydney Design Week 2023 Material Cultures

Objects testify

Exhibition

Objects testify is a community-engaged program exploring the colonial legacies of Australia's built environment and its ongoing impact on First Nations communities, led by Wiradjuri anti-disciplinary artist Joel Sherwood Spring.

Objects testify provokes an understanding of architecture as not just the built environment, but the digital and social technologies that propel extraction of raw material from the mine to the materiality of social life. Sherwood Spring describes ‘digging’ as the foremost colonial technique that makes all other colonial forms of exploitation possible.

The program features Joel Sherwood Spring’s video work Diggermode (2022) alongside loaned objects from public and private collections, including the Powerhouse Collection, that seek to illustrate the technologies of extraction and the ideologies propelling extractive practices.

Diggermode questions the social and environmental ethics of technology used in constructing, storing and sharing images, whether in surveillance databases, museum archives or online. The work considers the problems arising from new technologies giving open access to cultural belongings and documentation of Indigenous peoples.

A program of closed and public conversations between First Nations community, scholars, artists, architects and designers will explore key themes of Diggermode and consider new forms of testimony.