Bio
Ilan Manouach (Athens, 1980) is 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 and XXIst century’s technological disruptions. His artistic 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 festivals, museums and galleries worldwide. His work has been written about in Hyperallergic, New York Magazine, World Literature Today, Wired, Le Monde, The Comics Journal, du9, 50 watts and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Wasting Time on the Internet and his works are also part of the Ubuweb online contemporary art archive. He is an Onassis Digital Fellow (2020) and a Kone alumnus.
Manouach is the director of Futures of Comics, an international, recurrent research programme 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. He is also the CEO of Applied Memetic an organization that researches the political repercussions of generative art and highlights the urgency for a new media-rich internet literacy.