Painting by Anton Mykhalchuk

This work is part of Signs for the Blind, a conceptual series that explores how systems of signs replace active thinking and become substitutes for orientation, belief, and truth. Drawing on the visual language of road signs and Christian symbolism, the series examines blindness not as a lack of sight, but as a condition in which predefined symbols dictate movement, identity, and meaning. The work engages with the biblical myth of the creation of woman from Adam’s rib, while expanding the notion of the “rib” across multiple registers: anatomical, geometric, linguistic, and ideological. Here, the “rib” refers not only to the body, but also to an edge, a profile, and a rigid structural division. A human figure is constrained within the frame of a “no entry” sign, suggesting how cultural norms prohibit deviation from fixed gender roles. The inserted vertical element — physically embedded into the surface — functions simultaneously as a rib, an edge, and a line of separation, turning the body into a constructed object rather than a natural given. Gendered silhouettes, rendered in culturally coded colors, appear as simplified pictograms, while the letters M and W—referencing man and woman—are displaced to the margins and rotated edgewise. In this position, they lose their legibility and begin to resemble one another, revealing their dependence on orientation rather than essence. Inside the frame, difference is presented as absolute; outside it, these labels appear as equivalent forms with equal potential for becoming. The work exposes gender identity not as an innate truth, but as a regulated position within a symbolic system that mistakes limitation for order.