In an unusual twist on participatory art, visitors to an exhibition by two prominent Russian conceptual artists will be asked to donate blood for display.

Black Horizon, which tackles censorship and propaganda, is the work of Erik Bulatov and Andrei Molodkin. It is staged by a/political and opens on Saturday at the BPS22 museum in Charleroi, Belgium.

Molodkin, 53, who was born in the Soviet Union and now lives in Paris, has asked attendees to donate blood, which he will preserve in medical refrigerators and then pump into tubes using industrial compressors. The tubes will spell out song lyrics that he finds on government blacklists.

“It’s like blood karaoke,” he said. “Our program looks for musical lyrics that have been censored. Then people can come and choose to donate blood to whatever sentence attracts them.” A standard donation could be 200 grams of blood, he said.

Some of the lyrics chosen for the Charleroi exhibition come from the drill music scene in south London, whose artists have been prohibited from performing or broadcasting songs that mention rival crews.

Molodkin’s tubes will be displayed beside an eight-metre sculpture by Bulatov, an influential Soviet-born conceptualist. The sculpture, which spells out “Everything’s not so scary” in Russian, is intended to encourage visitors to reject propaganda and censorship, according to Bulatov.

Bulatov’s sculpture, which spells out ‘Everything’s not so scary’ in Russian. Photograph: Courtesy a/political and the artist

“Our consciousness is being manipulated by the press, by political actors, and as a result we’re ending up in a very difficult situation and we can feel trapped,” said Bulatov, a member of the 1960s Sretensky Boulevard group who has contrasted text and image in his work for decades.

Molodkin said both artists had been surprised by how an “open world … without censorship, strong nationalist feeling, where religion wasn’t dictating its own laws” had started “to close in front of our eyes”.

They said they weren’t aiming their criticism about censorship and propaganda at a particular country. Bulatov criticised both Russia and Europe. “It’s coming from everywhere,” he said of the propaganda he was targeting. “Europe is trying to push Russia away like an enemy. But that doesn’t necessarily hurt [Vladimir] Putin. It only helps Putin cement his power, because it looks like they are surrounded by enemies. It’s the people who suffer from this.”

Both said they expected a good response to the work in Russia as well as Europe. “I don’t see a big difference in the last generation between young people in Paris, in London, in Moscow,” said Molodkin.

Bulatov said: “There is a colossal difference between what happened in the Soviet period in Russia and what’s happening now. As long as the borders are open, the Soviet times won’t come back.”