Ilan Manouach (born July 11, 1980, in Athens) is an artist with a specific interest in conceptual and post-digital-comics[1] and is also active as a music performer, composer and book publisher,[2] He has produced commissions for newspapers such as The New York Times and it:Internazionale (periodico). He currently holds a PhD researcher position at the New Media Programme of the Aalto University in Helsinki (adv. Craig Dworkin) where he examines the intersections of contemporary comics, art and poetry.[3] His work and research claim the importance of comics as a materially self-reflexive medium, unaffiliated with any general art history. He has more than twenty published books, most of them published in the catalogue of fr:La Cinquième Couche, and he has also produced solo exhibitions at important comics festivals, museums and galleries worldwide. His work has been written about in Hyperallergic,[4] The Cut,[5] World Literature Today,[6] Wired,[7] Le Monde,[8] The Comics Journal,[9] du9,[10] 50 watts,[11]Kenneth Goldsmith’s Wasting Time on the Internet and his works are also part of the UbuWeb online contemporary art archive.[12]
Conceptual comics
Ilan Manouach holds a BFA from École supérieure des arts Saint-Luc in Brussels. Since 2003, he has published more than a dozen books under the catalogue of a small publishing house based in Brussels, fr:La Cinquième Couche. He has curated four anthologies bringing together contributions from artists, critics, lawyers and different professionals of the book industry. His work has been described as covering a range of different experimentation within the tradition of comics, from narratives, to rip-offs and appropriations and recently to the invention of a new language, Shapereader.[13]
His first book, published in 2003, was Les lieux et les choses qui entouraient les gens désormais. According to comics critic Thierry Groensteen, « […] It is not surprising that Manouach is also a jazz musician. His storytelling is entirely built as a succession of drone sounds, melodic lines, disjunctions, syncopations and improvisations and variations around a main theme[14] ».
In several later projects such as The Horse-Headed Statue, designed for an international architecture symposium in Greece in 2007, Écologie Forcée, a work commissioned by the fr:Biennale d'Art contemporain du Havre in 2010 and Both Sides of a Wall, produced for the fr:Festival de BD à Sierre in 2011, he uses exhibition space as a way to engage the spectator as the reader. Along with fr:Xavier Löwenthal, he is also the director of the anthology Le Coup de Grâce, a book that collects artists' contributions to the book's call for the creation of undetermined, deliberately evasive, and irredeemably idiosyncratic narratives.
He is known for the unsigned comics appropriations, and the manifestos supplementing these editions.
He has published illegal appropriations of existing comics, and re-injected the detournements in the book market.
Katz
Ilan Manouach is probably the author of the famous rip-off, Katz.[16]Katz is a pirated edition of Art Spiegelman's seminal graphic novel Maus. Katz is an exact copy of the French edition of Maus, with the difference that all the animal characters, have been redrawn as cats. The book was printed in November 2011 and it was seen in public for the first time in January 2012 during the Angoulême International Comics Festival that ran under Spiegelman’s presidency.
Noirs
Noirs is a fac-simile of the original edition of Les Schroumpfs Noirs,[17] with all printed colours replaced with blue. The book has been compared to certain appropriations from Carmelo Bene's, specifically Romeo e Giulietta : storia di Shakespeare secondo Carmelo Bene[18].[clarification needed]
Shapereader
Shapereader is a tactile language specifically designed to allow the creation of narrative works of tactile literature for, and from a visually impaired readership.[19] While it has been mainly created for the purposes of the blind community, the Shapereader repertoire can also be experienced by the acquainted regular user. Shapereader consists of a repertoire of anaglyph shapes called tactigrams designed to provide haptic equivalents for objects, actions, affections and characters.[20]
Shapereader has been presented during the International Comics Festival of Angoulême,[21] at the Onassis Cultural Center in Athens[22] and workshops have been conducted in Athens, Tel Aviv and France.
Bibliography
Les Lieux et les Choses qui Entouraient les Gens Désormais, La Cinquième Couche, 80 p., Brussels, 2003
La Mort du Cycliste, La Cinquième Couche, 56 p., Brussels, 2005
Arbres en Plastique, Feuilles en Papier, La Cinquième Couche, 90 p., Brussels, 2006
Le Coup de Grâce, La Cinquième Couche, 144 p., Brussels, 2006
The Golden Age, Kormoranos, 136 p., Athens, 2007
The Horse-Headed Statue, Kormoranos, 26 p., Athens, 2007
Frag, La Cinquième Couche, 128 p., Brussels, 2007
A Vara do Acucar da Meia Note e nos Bordos dos Peixes, Opuntia Syndrome, 44 p., Lisbon, 2007
Limbo Textbook, La Cinquième Couche, 54 p., Brussels, 2010
Limbo Sketchbook, La Cinquième Couche, 92 p., Brussels, 2010
Ecologie Forcee, Biennale du Havre Ed., 24 p., Havre, 2010
We All Go Down #4, SOAP Comics, 16 p., Brussels, 2010
Both Sides Of A Wall, SISMICS et Cinquième Couche, 24 p., Sierre, 2011
Katz, Dust, 288 p., Brussels, 2012
VSAdH / EdWB / IpAN (uDdPK), La Cinquième Couche et Montesinos, 112 p., Brussels/Lisbon, 2012
METAKATZ, La Cinquième Couche, 207 p., Brussels, 2013
Noirs, Unknown publisher, 54p., Brussels, 2014
Riki Fermier, La Cinquième Couche, 27p., Brussels, 2015
