Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, 6 – 30 October 1999,
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney 3 – 20 May 2000,
Monash Gallery of Art, 6 September – 20 October 2002
Sporting Life , Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 16 August – 13 November 2000
My City of Sydney, 20 November 2004 – 26 November 2006
New Australiana, regional tour 3 December – 20 April 2003
Photographica Australis, Sala del Canal de Isabel II, Madrid, 15 February – 10 April 2002
Photographica Australis , Asialink tour, 30 July, 2003 – 2004
De Overkant/ Down Under, The Haag Museum of Photography, 15 June – 9 September 2007
Embassy of Australia, 28 September – 15 November 2007
An examination of modern Australian leisure
“Anne Zahalka’s series, Leisureland maps some of the co-ordinates of modern leisure in images that occupy a vantage point between the production and consumption of down time. Her photographs document the stuff we do; the myriad forms of gambling, sightseeing in the air, underwater, in the past, hardening our bodies in gyms, crowding a lecture by Derrida, chilling at the pool, catching a simulated war or a round of Aqua Golf, ‘Golf, with a difference!’ 1
Through a series of large scale photographic images taken in real locations “Zahalka’s images deploy conventions of photographic realism in tandem with contemporary technologies that facilitate a precision of colour and detail, an organisation of pictorial surface, and a scale hitherto associated with traditional history painting or the advertising billboard”.2
1 See David Ellison’s Essay
2 See Blair French’s paper ‘The Photogenic Image on recent work by Rosemary Laing and Anne Zahalka’ at Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne.
