Emmaline Zanelli

Emmaline Zanelli was born in 1994 on Kaurna Country in Tarntanya/Adelaide, South Australia, where she continues to live and work today. Her practice centres on photography and video, often exploring the gestures, rituals and emotional textures that shape contemporary life.

In Pocket Money, Zanelli turns her lens toward young people navigating the early stages of working life. The participants are shown on the job, resting in their bedrooms, and immersed in their creative pursuits—an intimate sequence of scenes that resists any easy categorisation of a “generation.” Instead, Zanelli highlights both the variability and the limitations of entry‑level work, capturing the ways these roles structure daily experience.

The video foregrounds the rhythms of labour that shape contemporary youth: the unpaid time spent preparing for shifts; the thrill of a rare day off; the fleeting dopamine rush that follows spending hard‑earned wages; and the creeping dread that arrives the night before returning to work. Pocket Money underscores that while these young people have their whole lives ahead of them, their future is already framed by the relentless demands of work—work as identity, work as necessity, work as an ever‑present force.

Through her sensitive and observational approach, Zanelli offers a portrait of youth shaped not by stereotypes, but by the complex realities of contemporary labour.