Ilan Manouach (born 1980 in Athens, lives and works in Athens and
Brussels) is a musician, a book publisher and a multidisciplinary artist
with a specific interest in conceptual and post-digital
comics. He
currently holds a PhD researcher position at the Aalto University in
Helsinki (adv. Craig Dworkin) where he examines the intersections of
contemporary comics, art and poetry. His work claims for the importance of
comics as a materially self-reflexive medium, unaffiliated to any general
art history. He has more than twenty published bookworks under his belt,
solo exhibitions to important comics events worldwide. He is mostly known
for Shapereader, a tactile system of communication for comics artists with
visual disabilities. His
work has been written about in
Hyperallergic,
New York
Magazine,
World Literature Today,
Wired,
Le
Monde,
The Comics Journal,
du9,
50watts
and Kenneth Goldsmith's
Wasting Time on the Internet and his
works are also part of the Ubuweb online contemporary art archive. He is
the director of Futures of Comics, an international research program that
explores how comics are undergoing historic mutations in the midst of
increasingly financialized, globalized
technological affordances and proposes to map the social, economic,
racial and gendered forces
that shape the industry's commercial, communication and production
routines. It took place in 2019 during the Fumetto Comics Festival. He was
the curator of the Festival Shadow Libraries: Ubuweb in Athens, that
proposed to examine the uses of the archive in regards to artistic
production and explore the conceptual consistency and the ethics of
digital preservation and distribution in web libraries, through the lens
of its users and makers. The festival consisted of two symposia, four
workshops, an exhibition of media works and a 24h video
programme and took place in the Onassis Cultural Centre in March 2018.
