Commissioned
by Community Aid Abroad and exhibited at the Centre for Contemporary
Photography, Melbourne in 1997 and at Gallery 4a in Sydney in 1998.
Components of this series were shown at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in 1998.
This
body of work investigates specifically the place of women in two indigenous
communities in the Philippines. The photographs explore these via
traditional and contemporary photographic modes, the documentary,
the ethnographic/ anthropological and the touristic raising questions
about the limitations of these forms of representation. '.... Zahalka's
repetition of the image and signposting of its manipulability serve
to foreground the constructedness to which the cultural is subject
in the process of photography. Most effectiveÉ. is her critique of
postcard photography, a genre which ossifies and commodifies cultural
difference (more often than not the difference of subaltern ethnic
groups), turning it into a hollowed-out sign of colourful and unique
national identity'. 1