Shared Grounds

Shared Grounds
June 28 - August 10, 2025
Hunter’s Point South Park (along Center Blvd, south of 54th Avenue)
Long Island City, NY

program day with live performances
Saturday June 28, 3:00 - 8:00 PM

3:00 - 3:30 pm: Lotta Petronella
3:45 - 4:15 pm: Kastehelmi Korpijaakko
4:30 - 5:00 pm: Carmen Baltzar
5:15 - 6:00 pm: Jemila MacEwan, with Lee Tusman
6:15 - 8:00 pm: Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow

FCINY and Flux Factory are pleased to announce Shared Grounds, a roaming outdoor exhibition in Hunter’s Point South Park. The exhibition gathers performative works by Carmen Baltzar, Kastehelmi Korpijaakko, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, Jemila MacEwan, and Lotta Petronella — three Finnish artists and two New York-based members of the Flux Factory artist collective. Shared Grounds will be activated in a series of performances on June 28, 2025 from 3:00 to 8:00 PM, in Hunter’s Point South Park, Long Island City. 

Informed by eco-feminist thought, Shared Grounds speculates on placemaking via interspecies alliances and knowledge production, and gives thought to the potential for neighborly relations, codes, and customs in a public realm defined by humans and nonhumans alike.

The exhibition has sprouted from the complexity of thinking about public space in a city like New York, while considering Flux Factory’s new venue, Flux IV, a community space located at a mixed-use waterfront building at Hunter’s Point. The transformation of Hunter’s Point from former colonial village and wild forest area, to decommissioned shipyard, to Superfund site, and its most recent incarnation as an urban redevelopment with a lush, re-indigenized park, has served as the seeding point for each artist.

Shared Grounds is curated by Elina Suoyrjö (FCINY) and Meghana Karnik (Flux Factory), with curatorial assistance by Rowena Hurme. It is co-presented by Flux Factory and Finnish Cultural Institute in New York. Shared Grounds’ neighborhood partner is the Queens Landing Boathouse and Environmental Center and the graphic designer is Gonzalo Guerrero of Secret Riso Club, a New York-based artist-run space at the intersection of art, design, learning, publishing, printing, activism and community building. The exhibition is part of the pARTir initiative funded by the EU – NextGenerationEU, with additional support from New York State Council on the Arts and The American-Scandinavian Foundation.

About the artists

Carmen Baltzar is a Finnish writer-filmmaker based in Lisbon. She writes short stories, essays, and columns, and recently co-edited a collection of lyrical essays on the theme of death. She is currently working on her first novel and moving towards fictional storytelling in her filmmaking.

Kastehelmi Korpijaakko is a visual artist working on Harakka island in Helsinki, Finland. Their artistic practice leans on photography, text, spatial entities, and performance. Korpijaakko’s works are often playful attempts at giving space to other organisms and exercises in relinquishing control.

Lotta Petronella is a filmmaker, artist and curator based on an island in Finland. She is co- founder of CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago and has worked with and on islands for nearly two decades. Since her internationally awarded film Själö - Island of Souls (2020), she has been leading a multidisciplinary collaborative research project Själö Poeisis on the island of Seili. Her latest work Materia Medica of Islands was a new commission for the Helsinki Biennial in 2023. In addition to her filmmaking and art practice, Petronella is a devoted medicine and flower essence maker and tarot scholar. She also writes poems, makes soundscapes and runs a podcast called Little screams.

Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow is both a performer and sculptor, often exploring themes of syncretism, migration, and colonialism in the Caribbean. A key work of interest is Lyn-Kee-Chow’s Picnic Parade series: these works feature colorful tablecloths that are collaged into a giant quilted picnic blanket dress, which the artist wears while parading into the park, accompanied by co-performers, who accessorize the dress with local and exotic fruits, creating a “horn of plenty” for people to gather around. The performance brings together conviviality with the migration of seeds, peoples, and foods, and has been adapted to different contexts. The Picnic: Harvest of the Zephyr (2018) featured the largest picnic blanket dress.

Jemila MacEwan is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in New York. MacEwan was born in Scotland to Sufi parents, and immigrated to Australia as a child, where their upbringing intertwined scientific, mythological and spiritual ways of learning from the land. She has been working on an ongoing series of “ecomorphic meditations” wherein she observes the relationships, stories, and processes—the phenomenology and ontology—of the more-than-human world as a guide for inner and collective evolution. The artist writes and performs these meditations and performances often have a durational component, e.g. Seed Meditation was performed for 10 days in Washington Square Park from sunrise to sunset.

About Flux Factory

New York City-based and collectively led, Flux Factory’s mission is to support emerging artists through Artist-in-Residencies and Exhibitions, education and collaborative opportunities