An extensive and sophisticated exploration of a recurring theme in global comics—black box—which the artist has gathered and reorganized into a large-scale, collective, transtemporal and transgeographic narrative.
Ilan Manouach's
Tarwar expands upon the author's earlier
Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge, but broadens its scope to explore global comics. By leveraging computer vision technologies to study thousands of comics from diverse cultures,
Tarwar zeroes in on one recurring visual element: the black panel. These iconic elements, discovered in comics across genres and regions and cultural context all over the world, prompt reflection and signify narrative pauses, often evoking themes of introspection and suspense. Embracing the universality of this motif,
Tarwar, entirely composed by black panels, reveals how comics serve as a shared language that transcends geographic, cultural, and stylistic boundaries, creating a collective narrative experience in a globalized world.
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.
