Ukrainian photographer and gardener Alla Olkhovska says that at night when the bombs are falling near her Kharkiv house, twenty miles from the front of the war, she thinks about her flowers as a means of survival. Alla grows rare clematis and peony species and sells the seeds internationally through her online community. She is also renowned for her photography: using a macro lens, her pictures bring an intimacy to a different kind of survival: that of the garden.

Curator Sherry Coman interacts with Alla’s work to document how beauty can be a form of resistance to war. Using interview footage, Alla’s own curated pictures and her books, as well as an interactive media station, viewers will have a chance to discover how one urban garden in war time lives on in the world through countless seedlings now growing in many nations.
Contact: Sherry Coman (scoman@luther.wlu.ca)