Artist Bio

Anne Zahalka is one of Australia’s most highly regarded photo-media artists having exhibited extensively in Australia and overseas for over thirty years. She has held over 40 solo exhibitions and her work is included in all major museums in Australia. Zahalka’s work has often explored cultural and gendered stereotyping, challenging these with a humorous and critical voice. She deconstructs familiar images and re-presents them to allow other figures and stories to be represented that reflect on diversity and difference.

More recently her concerns have shifted to the environment and the ecological disaster that has been unfolding globally and in her country. In Wild Life, Australia, 2019, Zahalka reimagines early Australian dioramas from natural history museums to mark out unsettling ethical and environmental issues. By subverting these fixed narratives, she reflects on the changing relationships that exist between people and the natural world. Working with conservationists, scientists, curators and photographers, she incorporates new data to set out alternative ways of seeing the landscape and the damage that has been wreaked on it.

Zahalka was selected for the international photography exhibition Civilization – The Way We Live Now shown at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, 2018 and the National Gallery of Victoria in September 2019. In the same year, Zahalka developed a major exhibition with the Museum of Sydney presenting a history of early commercial street photography. She was commissioned to produce a series and portraits, restaging these historic photographs with descendants from the original images, set against the locations of the original photograph. In the same year, Zahalka travelled to Prague to undertake a residency at the Béhal Fejér Institute in Prague to exhibit The Fate of Things Prague, an installation about love and loss tracing her family’s story of persecution, exile and survival.

Artwork statement

I have been working with photographic records of historical museum dioramas for many years in my Wild Life, 2006/17 and Wild Life, Australia, 2019. Intended to educate museum visitors, these ‘habitat displays’ from the 19th century presented pristine environments, frozen in time, communicating apparent ‘truths’ about the natural world and humanity. By disrupting this idealised space, I subvert the idea of fixed information to reimagine the changing relationship that exists between people and the natural world. I have returned to reconsider these habit display and the profound impacts that have taken place in the Anthropocene.

For example, as a direct result of climate change, polar bears are migrating south, and brown bears are moving north in search of food and mates. With disappearing ice platforms, polar bears are unable to hunt seal and are forced to find their way on land scavenging and becoming ghost shadows of their former selves. Those that survive have found themselves mating with bears from another species Their offspring, a hybrid of their parents, named grolar bears after the mother polar bear, and pizzly bears after mother grizzly. Through recent studies, it appears that the offspring are not as strong.

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