We’ve heard of exhibitions costing an arm and a leg, but never a syringe full of blood. But this is precisely what Russian artists Andrei Molodkin and Erik Bulatov are requesting from the visitors of this exhibition on contemporary forms of propaganda. Using an industrial compressor to pump the donated blood into empty vessels which will then project phrases from censored underground youth music, Molodkin’s Young Blood (2019) will be presented alongside Bulatov’s Of НАСРАТЬ [to shit on] (2018-19)—a large-scale text installation which will physically expand and contract, as part of the show Black Horizon (9 February-19 May).
The exhibition is a collaboration between a/political, a new London-based not-for-profit art organisation focused on supporting radical political art, and BPS22, a re-developed gallery space in the former coal-mining hub of Charleroi, Belgium. Probing into the aesthetic language of Russia’s younger generation, it provides a platform for Molodkin and Bulatov to directly tackle issues such as the rise of far-right nationalism and neo-liberalism and will no doubt provide the requisite level of cheer befitting a show taking place in a post-industrial Belgian town in the middle of February.