Shared Grounds
June 28 - August 10, 2025
Hunter’s Point South Park (along Center Blvd, south of 54th Avenue)
Long Island City, NY
Opening day with live performances June 28th 3-8PM
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.
Opening Program Schedule
3:00 – 3:30 pm: Lotta Petronella
Location: Luminescence Sculpture (Center Blvd, between 54th & 55th Aves)
A choir by Lotta Petronella and neighbors of Hunter’s Point
3:45 – 4:15 pm: Kastehelmi Korpijaakko
Location: Salt Marsh in Hunter’s Point South Extension (Center Blvd, between 55th & 56th Aves)
Press conference by Kastehelmi Korpijaakko
4:30 – 5:00 pm: Carmen Baltzar
Location: Backyard of Flux IV (56-21 2nd St) — audience views from public walkway behind venue
nothing to be seen (a closed practice) by Carmen Baltzar, accompanied by Sandy Williams IV.
when a child passes on young, a sapling can be planted in the place of their burial. this way, it’s possible to continue visiting your child and watch them grow. this is a burial event.
5:15 – 6:00 pm: Jemila MacEwan
Location: Hunter’s Point South Kayak Ramp (near 2nd St & 56th Ave)
“ZERO//THE BIRTH OF VENIS”
with live music by ExquisiteCorp
A microbial awakening
A eukaryotic extinction
A molecular revenge
6:15 – 8:00 pm: Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow
Location: The Park of Barnie in Hunter’s Point South Extension (near Center Blvd, between 55th & 56th Aves)
“Picnic: Harvest of the Soft Sweet Sound” by Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, accompanied by Leopoldo Bloom, Justin Sterling, Fitzmore Prince Codogan, Vidho Lorville, Trasonia Abbott, Hsiao-Chu (Julia) Hsia, Gabriella Bornstein, Ronit Levin Delgado, Anna Ting Möller, and Rose Malenfant
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.
Carmen Baltzar is a Finnish-Romani artist working with film and performative text practices. Her world-effacing and time bending work moves between alternate feminine realities, ancestral knowledge and mythologies, intersections of love and power and Roma life and death. Carmen’s first novel will be published by Kosmos in 2026. Carmen curated and co-edited the anthology Ohi – kirjoituksia kuolemasta ja sen vierestä (Past – Writings on Death and Beyond, WSOY 2022), and her prose and poetry appeared in publications by WSOY, S&S, Kosmos and Kiasma and others. Carmen’s most recent short film All the Love in My Body follows the point of view of a pair of Romani sisters selling toys on a touristic beach.
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.
Flux Factory’s mission is to support emerging artists through residencies, exhibitions, education, and collaborative opportunities. Flux is an artist-led space that builds sustainable communities and retains creative vitality in NYC. Since 1994 Flux has hosted over 300 Artists-in-Residence, both local and international, as well as staged over 700 exhibitions across all disciplines. Flux’s home in Long Island City is a creative hive that incubates experimentation with collaborative processes. Flux hosts over 75 annual multidisciplinary events; all are free to the public while all participating artists are compensated. Each year Flux selects 40 Artists-in-Residence to develop their creative practices by offering affordable studios, shared workspaces (such as a print shop, wood shop, and technical office), a solo exhibition, as well as professional development opportunities.