Russian Artists Want You to Donate Human Blood for the Sake of Art

Russian artist Andrei Molodkin is not only widely-known for designing this $15,000 USD Supreme sample T-shirt, but also for his unconventional practice of incorporating human blood into his artworks.

Now, Molodkin and fellow artist Erik Bulativ are gearing up for a monumental exhibition called “Black Horizon.” The duo is asking visitors to donate blood to fill up giant containers sculpted into three-dimensional phrases such as “THE WALLS TURN RED” and “DEMOCRACY.” These large-scale text installations, which invoke the “aesthetic language of Soviet propaganda,” are meant to “encourage viewers to interrogate the current contemporary political landscape and the language used to express the challenges facing global alliances (fake news, Trump with NATO, Brexit, Putin testing the boundaries of the nuclear missile treaty),” added the gallery.

Those planning to attend the forthcoming exhibition at the BPS22 (Musée d’art de la Province de Hainaut) museum in Charleroi, Belgium will surely encounter a one-of-a-kind experience. “Industrial compressors will pump through medical refrigerators and tubes into empty monumental vessels that project phrases from censored underground music,” described the gallery. “The sound of the pumps, the language of drill music and blood create a striking, visceral experience.”

View select installations above and then head over to BPS22’s website to learn more. “Black Horizon” will go on view starting February 9 until May 19. Elsewhere in art, Sterling Ruby will launch a sculpture retrospective in Dallas.

BPS22
Boulevard Solvay 22
Charleroi, Belgium 6000