Alen Ilijic is a new media avant-garde composer, performer and artist. He has studied film music with Amit Sen at the City of Westminster College in London, UK, and composition, orchestration, electronic music and sound engineering at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade, Serbia, with Srdjan Hofman. Since 1996 Ilijic is a member of Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), USA, and since 2017 a member of The International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), Austria.
Alen Ilijic held concerts in Israel, USA, Austria, Germany, Portugal, Taiwan, France, Denmark, Greece, Croatia, and Serbia. Ilijic is also a guest lecturer at Universities, he held a lecture about contemporary ways of composing at The University of New Hampshire, Department of Music, USA, also in Vienna, at Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien.
He has exhibited artworks in solo, group and online juried exhibitions worldwide, such as ''Breathing While Black'' at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA, Augusta Savage Gallery, in 2020. Ilijic was awarded Styria Artist in residency, Graz, Austria in 2016.
As a composer, performer and artist, making visual art and music are comparative disciplines for Ilijic, not just in terms of joint presentations i. e. exhibition and concert at the same place, but also in his work where certain elements of expressions intertwine or are related in a specific manner. For example, the main constructive element in his paintings can be notation of his composition that is being performed. Alen Ilijic is using art and music to address urgent questions about anti-Semitism, racism, discrimination and destroyed individualism. Besides this, his main interest in creations is to emphasize the importance of the phenomenon of creativity with deeper meaning and knowledge which is reflected in passion for details, hidden codes, different visibility of layers, and controlled chaos in aleatory form. As opposite to mainstream aspiration for ‘beautiful’ and ‘fun’ in culture, his art and music highlight the ethical or moral position, process and ultimate intention with distinctly established artistic voice.
Milica Ilijic, art historian - curator