Exhibition poster

This month marks the 10th anniversary of Apparatjik, as their very first single “Ferreting” was released in September 2008.

Tomorrow a retrospective exhibition of Apparatjik’s various projects over the years, with graphic prints and video installations, will open at Pumphuset gallery in Landskrona, Sweden. The exhibition will also feature new graphic prints, created in collaboration with the New York-based artist Foxito.

Magne, Martin and Jonas was at the gallery yesterday to meet the local press. A picture was posted on Magne’s Instagram and articles later appeared on the websites of Helsingborgs Dagblad and Landskrona Direkt.

The Pumphuset exhibition will be on display until 28 October.

There will also be a retrospective Apparatjik exhibition as part of the MDF Festival in Szczecin, Poland, opening on 19 September:

This exhibition presents a retrospective look at visual works, objects, books and films from the Apparatjik oeuvre. Part of the exhibition is an experimental typographic poster wall by students of Prof. Sven Völker from the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam. Using words and sentences from old newspaper articles about Julia Pastrana, the work creates a fresh portrait of the life and death of an exceptional woman.

And as previously mentioned, Apparatjik will also be performing during the MDF Festival, on Sunday 23 September at the Szczecin Philharmonic Hall.

The first part of the concert is called “The Sound of Szczecin”, and has been created in a partly similar way as “The Sound of Fosnavåg” four years ago, in collaboration with Audiokolor:

This composition is the result of an exceptional project carried out on 17th and 18th April 2018 in Szczecin. The city streets were cruised by specially marked cars equipped with devices collecting geodata from the streets, which were later transformed into binary codes, and these – into music codes. (…) The piece will be performed for the first time during the final of the MUSIC.DESIGN.FORM festival by the Szczecin Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra and the synth-pop group Apparatjik. It will be a unique opportunity to hear how Szczecin sounds.

The second part of the concert is called “A Heroine for our time – the artist Julia Pastrana”, and will once again feature special guest Concha Buika on vocals:

“A Heroine for our time – artist Julia Pastrana” is the world premiere of the orchestral version of the song “Heroine of our time”, based on musical material for an upcoming opera detailing the tragic life of Mexican circus artist Julia Pastrana. The story of a peculiar woman with a beard, her fate and loneliness, will be told by music and light images created jointly by Apparatjik, Szczecin Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, as well as Concha Buika – a Spanish vocalist and composer.

A video clip of Rune Bergmann and Magne talking about the upcoming Szczecin performance can be seen here.

The story of Julia Pastrana was also the inspiration for Apparatjik’s “Day of the Dead”-performance with Buika in Bergen two years ago. Buika’s latest single “Deadbeat”, released in June, is a cover version of the Apparatjik song from 2010.