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Indulis Bilzens – Biography by Oskars Redbergs

Biography.

INDULIS BILZĒNS (BIL) was a Latvian, avant-garde multimedia artist born in 1940 in Riga. After the Soviet occupation and his father’s deportation to Siberia, he was forced to move with his mother to Germany at the age of five and ended up in Eslingen in the American-controlled (ex) territory. He studied English Philology at King’s College, Cambridge, Medicine at the University of Bonn, and Informatics at the Technical University of Stuttgart as a free student. Active in the Latvian community in exile, Bilzēns lived in Germany but never consciously accepted German citizenship. He retained only his status as a citizen of the German Federation as he had always considered it more important to maintain his status as a foreigner (both for artistic and political reasons) – belonging to Latvia, having a UN passport, and not wanting to serve in the German army. Indulis thus independently underligned his “otherness” – belonging both to Latvia and to the global avant-garde artist community simultaneously, as opposed to the local German one. At the same time, Indulis Bilzens was an active member of the international student movement in Germany in the 1960s, and protested against the dangers of the use of atomic energy in the 1970s. Indulis was also a columnist and journalist, working as an author and reporter for the monthly Pflasterstrand. Indulis was also involved in the founding of the press agency “ID”, which later became the well-known newspaper “Die Tageszeitung” and the German Green Party. He was also publisher of the avant-garde magazine “D!Fanatic” and worked as a broadcaster for WDR Radio in Cologne and Stuttgart.

Indulis as a producer and multimedia artist, was a true pioneer of the contemporary house and techno music movements including “Low Spirit 84”, “Love parade” and “Mayday 89” in West Berlin, Germany. At the same time, he was an active artist using the MediaMix concept, which involves the use of all available artistic techniques and languages in the genre of performance. Indulis participated in the contemporary art exhibition “Dokumenta” in Kassel with ”minus delta t radio” in 1988, and ”Van Gog TV” in 1992. He was also a part of the international art festival “Ars Electronica” in Linz in 1993 and with ”Braeunungsstudio Malaria” in 1994. In the early 1980’s, he organized the Valdis Āboliņš exhibition in Riga and Berlin. In the late 1980s together with the NGBK in Berlin, he organised the Latvian contemporary art exhibition “Riga Latvian Avant-Garde”. Indulis was an active promoter of Soviet Latvian artists in Western Europe and brought the exhibition “Unerwartete Begegnung (Latvian Classical Painting)” to Berlin in 1990. In the early 1990’s, Indulis Bilzēns collaborated with NSRD, Hardijs Lediņš, Roberts Gobziņš, Jānis Krauklis, and Uģis Poli. This collective introduced the DJ movement and the concept of an independent pirate radio to the Latvian and Soviet public, an effort which later resulted in the independent “Radiodeju” project.
During the first two decades of the 21st century, Bilzēns contributed to cultural criticism initiatives aimed at advancing Latvian society from the Post-Soviet state of failed modernity. Inspired by cultural discourses in Frankfurt, the book “Mūsdienu kultūras stāvokļi/Conditions for Contemporary Culture. Riga” by Oskars Redbergs emerged, quickly becoming the centerpiece of contemporary cultural debate and criticism in Riga. There was also the curation of “9 Conditions of Riga: Regeneration and Transformation of the City – Urban Environment and Architecture”—the largest traveling architecture exhibition in Frankfurt for the ECB Cultural days. Lastly, one cannot forget the building of The New School of Architecture in Riga established in 2010.
The final performance by Indulis Bilzens, “Riga stronger than Death”, was curated in 2014 by Oskars Redbergs in Riga. The work utilized his infamous MediaMix concept—a methodology incorporating all available artistic techniques and languages in the genre of performance. In this specific work, Bilzens incorporates the poetry of Italian attraverso, Knut Skujenieks, T.S. Eliot, Uldis Berzins, Rainis, Ovid, Horace, Neruda, and even the artist himself. These prose coexist and intermingle with a mix of techno music tracks created by a former student of Bilzens, DJ Westbam.
The movie ”Era of Dance”, released in 2017 and directed by Viktors Buda, was dedicated to the techno music movement and the relationships between the West and the East. Indulis Bilzens served as a diplomat for this historic invasion, one that would become a cultural phenomena.

Biography by Oskars Redbergs