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<\/p>\n
“But it is also heartbreaking.”<\/p>\n
More than two decades later, Zahalka said the image has taken on added weight following the recent antisemitic attack at Bondi.<\/p>\n
Kastel’s wife, featured in Zahalka’s portrait, lost a close relative during the December 14 shooting, which occurred beside the same beach where the photograph was taken some 24 years earlier.<\/p>\n
“Everybody seems to be connected to somebody who was lost that day,” she said.<\/p>\n
Zahalka said her beach works were originally conceived as a response to narrow visual myths surrounding Australian identity.<\/p>\n
“I was thinking about the stereotypes of the beach and the mainstream images we know of the blonde surfer,” she said.<\/p>\n
More than two decades later, with Bondi now linked in many minds to the recent attack, some may find themselves longing for the simpler beach mythology Zahalka set out to challenge.<\/p>\n
“Back then, there weren’t images to represent our mix of ethnic backgrounds,” she said.<\/p>\n
Beyond the beach, Zahalkaworld spans a wide range of settings and approaches, including staged interiors, archival interventions and constructed scenes that question how history and national identity are formed.<\/p>\n
Born a first-generation Australian to a Catholic father and a mother whose family was impacted by the Holocaust, Zahalka said her interest in identity and belonging is closely tied to her own family history.<\/p>\n
“My mother wasn’t a practicing Jew, and she hid it because she’d been persecuted,” she said.<\/p>\n
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