Three questions to Bohdana Tkach

23 May 2025

About Bohdana

I'm Bohdana Tkach, an artist, photographer, and graphic designer from Rivne, Ukraine. My creative path is rooted in my studies of environmental design at the Kyiv Academy of Decorative and Applied Arts and free graphics at NAOMA. These experiences shaped my unique visual language, blending traditional techniques with modern artistic practices. My work centres on the exploration of the human body, especially the female form, as a vessel of identity, emotion, and history.

Since 2019, I have been drawn to cyanotype, an alternative photographic printing method, which allows me to merge tactile craftsmanship with conceptual depth.

I would describe myself as a seeker—a weaver of thoughts, emotions, and images. My mind thrives on the poetry of connection, the quiet questions that linger between moments, and the beauty found in both complexity and simplicity. I am drawn to the interplay of light and shadow, in the world and within myself, always searching for meaning and expression that transcend the immediate.

What are the main questions that bother you at the moment?

I find myself in a time of reassessment, where everything around me seems to demand rethinking. I’ve always been someone who questions a lot — I think, analyse, wander back into the past or gaze ahead into the future. But now these questions feel heavier. I’m troubled by the constant need to choose, over and over, I’m faced with decisions that pull me in different directions. Every step I take feels like it casts a shadow into my future, shaping paths I cannot yet see. It’s exhausting. Life once seemed simple, almost predictable, but now even the smallest gesture holds tremendous consequence.

Death also lingers close — it has for some time now. Maybe it’s natural to stand closer to it than before, to try and grasp the impermanence of everything, to remember that time never truly belongs to us.

I find myself reflecting on justice, on honesty. On the need to be honest with myself, to truly hear myself, my desires, my needs. To be honest, the world I see around me feels unfamiliar now. It has become distant. I feel more like an outsider, walking alongside it, trying to carve my own uncertain path.

The question of justice weighs heavily. And everything I reflect upon seems inevitably intertwined with pain — choices, death, the sense of injustice, the feeling of not understanding the world I inhabit.

What do you fear?

I don’t even know exactly what it is I fear anymore. I fear running out of time to realise myself, to do what feels important to me. I fear wasting time. I fear for my loved ones, for their safety. I fear making wrong choices in my life, even though I understand that mistakes are inevitable. I fear not being able to provide for myself, to secure my own life. The very question of life itself seems to stand before me now.

Where do you get the courage to do what you want?

When the desire to create becomes stronger than all the doubts. It’s always a struggle — a battle with myself, a dialogue of restless monologues.

It takes faith, hunger, longing. Creating helps me release something, to leave a trace, to try and catch a fragment of time. Sometimes this need comes over me like a wave. There is still so much I haven’t seen, haven’t felt, haven’t lived. And in spite of everything, or maybe because of it, I want to see what’s next — and whether there will be light waiting there.