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.”

The exhibition also features a new portrait of Melbourne artist Nina Sanadze, whose preservation of flowers left at the Bondi memorial site became, in Zahalka’s words, “a monument of love, support and compassion” for the Jewish community and the victims of the attack.

Another highlight is The Kunstkammer: Artist’s Studio & Archive, an immersive recreation of Zahalka’s studio bringing together family memorabilia, letters, diaries and personal objects tracing her Czech-Viennese Jewish heritage and her family’s history of displacement.

Jewish Museum of Australia director and chief executive Sidra Moshinsky said the exhibition took on different meaning depending on its venue.

“At each venue, this exhibition takes on a different resonance through its connection to place. At the Jewish Museum of Australia, Anne Zahalka’s work invites us to consider how her perspective as a first-generation Australian, the daughter of a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor and a Catholic Czech, has shaped the way she sees Australia, identity and belonging. That perspective gives renewed meaning to familiar images, including Bondi Beach, whose story has changed so profoundly.”

Zahalka has presented more than 40 solo exhibitions and has shown work internationally, including at the Australian embassy in Washington, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul.

She won the Bowness Photography Prize in 2023 for Kunstkammer, and in 2026 The Bathers (1989) was included in an Australia Post commemorative stamp series.

Find out more at jewishmuseum.com.au/exhibitions/zahalkaworld