Leila Nadir and Cary Adams are designers, artists, critical researchers, storytellers, and educators. They investigate a cultural memory disorder they call industrial amnesia. Their mediums emphasize deep-diversity user experiences told through poetic visibility, feeling-perception, and the simple acts of everyday life. Lately they find that Donna Haraway’s words are the best descriptors for what preoccupies them: “partial healing, modest rehabilitation, and still possible resurgence in the hard times of the imperial Anthropocene and Capitalocene.” Leila and Cary work across disturbed ecological zones to explore the chances for restorative gestures and collaborative repair amidst disaster and ruins. (Leila blogs essays and updates here about her forthcoming memoir, a childhood chronicle of Cold War politics, Afghan-American diaspora, and inter-generational trauma. Healing the self and the earth takes a long time, and there’s not much of that left, but maybe remembering generates imagination of new and old worlds.)
Here is a list of some of their institutional credentials: Leila and Cary have earned support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Center for Land Use Interpretation, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, K2 Family Foundation, Franklin Furnace Fund, and numerous academic fellowships. Their performances, exhibitions, and lectures have taken place at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Postmasters Gallery, New York University, 319 Scholes, Smackmellon Gallery, Exit Art, U.C.L.A., M.I.T. Media Lab, ISEA 2012, Banff New Media Institute, European Media Art Festival, Parsons The New School for Design, and the Neuberger Museum of Art, and lots of other places. Their work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum, Walker Art Center, Rhizome.org, Turbulence.org of New Radio & Performing Arts, and Cornell University Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art.
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