Anne Zahalka’s career-spanning exhibition

A major survey exhibition of photographer Anne Zahalka’s four-decade career, Zahalkaworld: an artist’s archive, is now open at the Jewish Museum of Australia in St Kilda, running until January 24, 2027.

The exhibition, toured by the Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh), presents photographs, new commissions and previously unseen material from Zahalka’s personal archive. It is structured around five themes: nature, people, gesture, memory and archive, and includes personal objects, letters, diaries and family memorabilia being shown publicly for the first time.

Zahalka, born in 1957, is the daughter of a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor mother and a Catholic Czech father. Her work explores identity, memory, migration and belonging.

The Melbourne presentation includes new commissions responding to the museum’s context. Among them is a new edition of her 1989 work The Bathers, titled The Bondi Bathers (2026), which references the Jewish Hakoah swimming club in pre-war Vienna, where Zahalka’s mother was a competitive swimmer before fleeing Europe for Australia.

“This revision of my original Bathers came from a desire to recognise Jewish identity within one of my most iconic images and to acknowledge the community in Bondi following the tragedy that took place there on December 14, 2025”, Zahalka said. “It also serves as a reminder of our strength when we come together.”