Concrete & Glass announce David Shrigley, Martin Creed and more

As previously reported, the Concrete & Glass festival returns to East London for 2010, offering a mix of high installations and performances showcasing new and established talent from the realms of music and art.

Concrete and Glass is curated by Tom Baker (of Eat Your Own Ears), Flora Fairbairn and Paul Hitchman. For this year’s event the organizers have also invited independent curators to contribute collaboratively to the event. These include Joana Seguro of Lumin, and Maurice Einhardt Neu Gallery. Event partners include the Arts Council, Sound and Music, Rockfeedback, Contemporary Art Society and murmurART. This year the art exhibitions will be presented in partnership with 20 Hoxton Square Projects, with the music and sound-art events taking at nearby Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen and The Macbeth.

Three specially commissioned music events have just been announced. On May 13 at Hoxton Square Bar & Grill, Volcano The Bear will perform a live soundtrack to Fischl & Weiss’s The Way Things Go, with support from The Owl Project, who combine their music-making with an interest in carpentry, and are actually pretty good value (we enjoyed their show at C&G 2009, at any rate).

At The Macbeth on May 18, there’s a show from Cutup Collective, Solina Hi-Fi, Rocketnumbernine and Musclehead DJs, and David Shrigley presents his Worried Noodles project, plus Martin Creed and Please, at Bar & Kitchen on May 27.

The centre-piece of Concrete & Glass’s art strand is Heart of Glass, an exhibition on the ground floor of 20 Hoxton Square comprised of selected from an open submission process. Artists featured are as follows:

In true Pop Idol style, a panel of art experts will select from the above exhibitors a “winner” who will be offered a solo show at the following year’s festival. This year’s panelists include John Kieffer, Creative Director Sound & Music, Paul Hobson, Director of the Contemporary Art Society, and Sabine Unamun, of the Arts Council.

Upstairs, Shop & Office is an exhibition of the work of Tom Saunders and Idéfix Bloc, but it’s the two Lumin-commissioned works that we’re particularly looking forward to checking out. Techno Harmonium is a collaboration between Felix Thorn and abysmally named digital visuals artists Weirdcore, and explores the links between electronic synthesizers and early organ designs; it will open with an improvised live visual and audio performance on May 13 followed by a week-long installation.

The second commission is for a variation of Kathy Hinde‘s Piano Migrations series: Piano Migration II – Video responsive instrument. This work will trandfor an old piano into a light activated instrument through video. There’ll be a live performance on May 20 with Hinde joined by laptop musician Matthew Olden, cellist Simon McCorry and multi-instrumentalist Nahum Mantra.

More Concrete & Glass announcements coming soon, including detials of SEEN, a collaboration between Martin Sexton and Bo Ningen.