Beyonce, Adele, Miley and more: Meet the British artist behind the Powerhouse’s hidden gem

Can you look a stranger in the eye for 15 minutes and glimpse their soul? Would differences dissolve, or loneliness evaporate in that sustained gaze?

These are the questions British artist Es Devlin poses in The Turning, her inaugural Australian exhibition and the headline international show opening the new $1 billion Powerhouse Parramatta.

Devlin is celebrated globally for blurring the line between art and stagecraft, having designed concert sets for Beyoncé, Adele, Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga, co-designed Super Bowl halftime shows, and shaped visual spectacles from London’s West End to the Australian Open’s player tunnel at Rod Laver Arena.

For the Powerhouse, she has assembled six art installations and arranged them into chapters on its fifth floor, with the final, an egg-shaped sound pavilion, serving as a stage on the museum’s terrace and bearing the hallmarks of the set design she helped create for the Irish band U2 in Las Vegas.

Upstairs, at the heart of the show sits Collective Portrait, anchored by a 24-metre table holding a continuous paper scroll. Visitors take opposite seats, set a timer for 15 minutes, and sketch the stranger facing them. The resulting drawings join an ever-expanding communal tapestry hung across the gallery walls. Devlin has staged iterations worldwide – from London’s National Portrait Gallery to Miami, Seoul and Sao Paulo.

“Doesn’t matter whether you can draw or not, I don’t mind,” Devlin explains. “It’s more: can you look into the eyes of a stranger for 15 minutes and leave a trace of that encounter? There aren’t many conditions currently in our society where you can safely look a stranger in the eye for that long.”

The concept originated when Devlin invited 50 strangers into her London home, one by one. “I didn’t speak to them. I just looked into their eyes for 45 minutes and drew, and I found it deeply moving. What I expected of them, what I thought they might be, gradually fell away. If you don’t speak, the things you disagree about don’t govern the room.”

The Turning is one of five shows debuting at the museum, including Task Eternal, The Dark, The Mall and Overflow. The LED screens and fabricated structures were installed at a cost of $10 million, contracts show.

While an artist of Devlin’s global stature might traditionally have launched at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Powerhouse’s Lisa Havilah approached the artist three years ago, via personal introductions, and asked her to open in western Sydney. It represents an unorthodox offering for a museum once touted as Australia’s answer to the Smithsonian, her show replacing original plans for a planetarium.

Devlin says it wasn’t always the case that the arts and science were categorised into specialities.

“We need both modes of attention,” she says. “What I’ve felt in all the team that I’ve been working with in this building over three years is their absolute passion about not separating. I went on a big tour of all the other exhibitions and this place is like a day out, and it’s free. I think there are 1500 items from the collection in here, but they are contextualised in a thought-provoking way.

“Entertainment gets a bad rap, doesn’t it? But of course, its original meaning is entretenir – to hold people together. That is what cultural institutions need to do. To borrow Maya Angelou’s insight, people will forget what you said and what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”

The Turning begins with Forest of Us, a poetic video narrated by Devlin that reveals the biological symmetry between the human lungs and forest canopies producing the oxygen to sustain life. Viewers then step physically through the screen into a mirror maze, akin to Coney Island, where they lose themselves in fractured reflections.

From the maze, audiences emerge into Memory Palace, an illuminated disc highlighting monuments and moments of individual action and human achievement: from the railings of Parliament Square where Emmeline Pankhurst protested to the banks of the Parramatta River.

“I began developing this work after reading a particularly bleak climate report, wondering if humanity could ever alter its path,” Devlin says. “Remembering Pankhurst, remembering James Baldwin – it proves that we have shifted before, and we can again.”

The interaction continues in ScreenShare, where an entire room is papered floor-to-ceiling with prints from Devlin’s 30-year archive – spanning pop concert sketches to botanical studies. Visitors are invited to peel a print directly off the wall to take home. A sketch for a sketch.

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