Flux Factory

Opening • Pickles & Concrete
2025-11-15 18:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | Flux IV, 56-21 2nd St, Long Island City
Join us for the opening reception of Pickles & Concrete, an exhibition by Kosmologym, Walker Tufts, and Greg Stewart. Pickles & Concrete is a time negotiating kitchen laboratory where bacteria makes pickles & bioconcrete. Pickles & Concrete also examines human attempts to alter the flow of time. In the kitchen we freeze, dehydrate and pickle foods to remove them from their usual cycle of decay. In contrast, we freeze and thaw concrete to simulate the passage of entire seasons in a single day. Pickles & Concrete invites players to get tangled up in the time scales between food preservation, building materials, bacteria and geology in an attempt to re-story science.

Something Fierce
2025-11-22 12:00 - 21:00, 2025-11-23 12:00 - 21:00 | Flux IV, 56-21 2nd St, Long Island City
How can nature inspire new modes of resistance through rising tides of hypercapitalism?

Join us for Something Fierce, an arts festival at Flux IV in Hunters Point, Queens, opening Saturday November 22. The festival presents performances and interdisciplinary artworks by leading contemporary artists encompassing new media, video, sculpture, and installation. The works engage with biodiversity, speculative ecology, psychogeography, and climate change, through the lens of queer desire, community, and persistence. The location is at the mouth of Newtown Creek — one of the most polluted waterways in the United States.PROGRAM SCHEDULEFestival & Exhibition Hours | Saturday and Sunday, noon-9pm

Exhibition Opening | Saturday, November 22, 5-9pmCaroline McManus, Eli Brown, Eva Tellier, Hannes Egger, Hey There Kapplow, Martha Steele, Mason Youngblood, Michael Abrams, Midheaven Or Nah, Sally Beauti Twin, Walker Tufts, Zack Handler, zavé martohardjono.

Performances | Saturday, November 22Noon-4:00pm Earthworks (outside- durational)Trasonia Abbott (MC)6:00pm Esther, The Bipedal Entity!6:30pm Ria Rajan7:00pm Noah Ortega

Performances | Sunday, November 233:30pm-4:30pm Lea Fulton (outside- durational)4:00pm andrea haenggi & slice of elder tree with Muyassar Kurdi5:30pm zavé martohardjono with Stacy Lynn Smith and Mike Clemow7:00pm Dirty Time Karaoke

Live ArtSaturday & Sunday, 1 – 5 PM | Midheaven Or NahSaturday, Noon – 9pm & Sunday, Noon – 7pm | Hey There KapplowSaturday, 5-9 pm | zavé martohardjono

Film and Video Program | Saturday and Sunday, noon-9pmAndrés Senra, Cherry Nin, Elsa Brès, Kris Grey in collaboration with Maya Ciarrocchi, Sandrine DeumierFor more information, visit: www.ameliamarzec.com/somethingfierce/

Vinyl Ain't Sheet no.1
2025-12-06 17:00 - 18:00 | Flux IV, 56-21 2nd St, Long Island City
The first composition of Vinyl Ain’t Sheet by Yo Vinyl Richie is performed by an ensemble of 4 turntables. The composition is scored for turntables, guided from Scratch notation and TTM (Turntablist Transciption Methology) principles. The intention of the composition is to change everytime the piece is performed. On December 6, Vinyl Ain’t Sheet will be performed twice — once as intended by the composer, the second as selected by the performers. Yo Vinyl Richie will also premier two new turntable works, “Trying to carve my name into this table” and “Playing new music for new buildings”.

About the ArtistYo Vinyl Richie, born in the Bronx and currently living in New York City, is a composer and turntablist whose passion for the turntable began at an early age. Inspired by DJ competitions and parties as a child, he honed turntablism techniques and embraced the turntable as his primary instrument, both solo and in collaboration with others. Richie has showcased his artistry at esteemed venues such as Roulette, The Kitchen, Princeton University, and Queens Town Hall. He is currently a Harvestworks TIP resident and also a recipient of the NYSCA 2025 grant as a composer.

Vinyl Ain’t Sheet no.1 is presented as part of the artist’s 2025 NYSCA Fellowship.

First Look: Beyond Performance by Tray Tsui
2025-12-14 19:00 - 20:00 | Flux IV, 56-21 2nd St, Long Island City
Following the unique journeys of queer, trans, and non-binary emerging performers in Brooklyn, Beyond Performance, a documentary project by Tray Tsui, examines the creative process behind the creation of a drag act, while offering an in-depth exploration of the thoughts, motivations, hopes, fears, and joys of gender non-conforming artists as they navigate the interior and exterior challenges of owning one’s gender presentation in a society rigid with gender norms.

***Please note the time for this event has updated to start at 7:00 PM.***

Beyond Performance is presented as part of the artist’s 2025 NYSCA Fellowship.

Image: Kayla Weaver/PixelJournalism.

Shared Grounds x Chance Ecologies
2025-12-16 06:00 - 20:00 | Flux IV, 56-21 2nd St, Long Island City
Please join us for Shared Grounds x Chance Ecologies, a curatorial presentation and panel discussion looking at two exhibitions sited at Hunter’s Point: Shared Grounds (2025) and Chance Ecologies (2015). The evening brings artists and curators together to reflect on their projects and consider new potentials for artistic research and collaboration in Hunter’s Point; given the fruition of rezoning and development along the Newtown Creek in the past decade. This event is co-organized with Finnish Cultural Institute in New York (FCINY).

Participants

Introduction: Klaudia Ofwona Draber, Director of Programs, FCINYCuratorial Presentations: Catherine Grau & Nathan Kensinger, Co-Curators, Chance Ecologies; Meghana Karnik, Co-Curator, Shared Grounds / Curator & Exhibitions Director, Flux FactoryPanelists: Dylan Gauthier, Artist, Chance Ecologies; Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, Artist, Shared Grounds; Nat Roe, Executive Director, Flux Factory

Exhibition Histories

Chance Ecologies (2015) was a framework for artistic gestures and research projects exploring the un-designed landscapes and wilderness found in abandoned spaces, post-industrial sites, and landfills. The main trajectories of the project are to create research and discourse around the value of wild spaces in the urban environment; to document, learn from, and commemorate the naturally occurring ecosystems that are being lost to development; and to articulate contemporary readings of and new forms of relating to (urban) wilderness. The exhibition was curated by Catherine Grau, Nathan Kensinger, and Stephen Zacks. https://chancecologies.org/

Shared Grounds (2025) was an experimental exhibition that gathered performative works by Carmen Balthazar, 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. Informed by eco-feminist thought, the project speculates on placemaking via interspecies alliances and knowledge production, and gives way to the potential for neighborly relations, codes, and customs in a public realm defined by humans and nonhumans alike. The exhibition was curated by Elina Suoyrjö and Meghana Karnik, and co-presented by FCINY and Flux Factory. https://www.fluxfactory.org/shared-grounds/

Closing Reception with Presentation by Pasha Cas
2026-01-11 16:00 - 18:00 | Flux IV, 56-21 2nd St, Long Island City
Please join us at Flux IV for the closing reception of our current exhibitions, Itala Aguilera: Tierra Mojada (Wet Land) and Kosmologym’s Pickles & Concrete, featuring a special presentation by visiting artist-in-residence Pasha Cas.Presentation: Pasha CasPasha Cas arrives in a space where the European myth of freedom has been materialized and transformed into a symbol of American identity. By exploring the urban environment, monuments, and people, the artist seeks historical parallels and ruptures between promise and reality, between the myth and its contemporary interpretation.

Using his own body as a tool for artistic expression, he embeds himself into the city’s public and symbolic spaces. In these “gestures,” the temporary is juxtaposed with the eternal, and the personal with the monumental. The artist analyzes how myths and symbols created to affirm freedom lose their clarity and conviction over time, lingering in the space between relevance and the loss of meaning.

The starting point of this exploration is the phrase “Give me liberty, or give me death!” the political slogan delivered by Patrick Henry at a convention to gather support for a revolutionary break from England, which subsequently became a myth. This phrase was never recorded in writing and has reached us through oral tradition, making it fluid, changeable, and dependent on context. Over time, it has transformed, adapting to the era, ideology, and political climate.

Exhibition: Lotte Van den Audenaeren
2026-07-15 17:00 - 19:00 | Flanders House New York – New York Times Building, 620 Eighth Avenue, 38th floor, New York, United States
realities are messy & in it i am: a rock. or a wave / / /// //surface comma & 2 gallons of natural spring water

Image: Lotte Van den Audenaeren, autonomy comma a future / / // //// / // //// , later & beyond (2026).

RSVP Mandatory. Flanders House New York at The New York Times Building requires a government-issued ID on entry.

Please join us for a pop-up exhibition of Lotte Van den Audenaeren. Van den Audenaeren will present a selection from indigo series (2023), featuring posters made from raw denim. In a transformation process, the fabric is gradually altered, cut, and washed. Details, changes, and delicate cuttings become strikingly visible, revealing damage and breakages readable in delicate traces — notes on meticulous attention and care.

Like membranes, the denim surfaces encapsulate change, delineating the processes and presence of movement or force; as opposed to materials such as glass, which capture time in as a volume (mass from within) and in whose viscous phase it becomes possible to draw, move, and shape before it cools into something hard, solid, and irreversibly fragile. It is precisely this moment that is indicated and captured in O series (2017 – present) by minute O-shaped movements, resulting in an unfinished series of glass marks, singular representations of the momentary.

ProgramIntroduction and interview by Melinda Lang, Director of Programs and Exhibitions, International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP)Works On Viewindigo series:a rock under water multiple rhythms, indigo series (2023)focus on things that almost weren’t there, (2023)no for an answer (2023)ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok (2023) O series:o no (2026)o indigo denouement (2026)& comma anew (2026) print edition, 100 copies 2 gallons of natural spring water, (2026) water, containers

About the ArtistLotte Van den Audenaeren makes works that illuminate the material dimensions of time as it takes shape in patches of natural sunlight, transient sounds, swathes of fluorescent fabric, or decaying natural objects. With an artistic practice that is open to the intentions & durations of her materials, she works with time as though it were a strip of celluloid film—parsing, fixing, & editing the fleeting moment through material processes such as bronze casting, glass blowing, ceramic firing, & photography. (Text by Isabelle Lynch)

This event is presented by Consulate General of Belgium, Flanders House New York, and Flux Factory.

Opening • 502 Bad Gateway: Error is Shadow
2026-08-06 18:00 - 21:00 | Flux IV, 56-21 2nd St, Long Island City
Join us for the opening reception of Error is Shadow, a solo exhibition by artist duo 502 Bad Gateway on Thursday, August 6 from 6 – 9 PM, with a brief artist talk at 7 PM.

Error is Shadow explores the legacy of structural and cultural decay, monuments of shame, trans-civilizational communication, and post-human adaptivity. Mankind’s desire to justify its narrative purpose leaves it with only self-referential answers to impossible questions, building elaborate protocols that favor controllable results over truth. Through a network of paintings, sculptures, a narrative film, and a roguelike deckbuilder game, the work plays upon the human tendency to create needlessly complex systems when faced with the perilous unknown in an attempt to govern the ungovernable. Error is Shadow adds another forking branch to the wired network of conceptual storytelling that has been the cornerstone of 502 Bad Gateway’s artistic practice.About the Artist

502 Bad Gateway (@502.bg) is the artist duo of Alexander Baumann and Robert Ruth, whose collaborative artistic disciplines include motion capture performance, oil painting, 3D game development, sculpture, vintage tech restoration, building audio synthesizers, animation, and filmmaking. Their practice focuses on integrating their artistic methods with deprecated technologies from many different eras, drawing on the history of usage to underline the intent of the work.

Their work has been displayed in solo exhibitions at T293 gallery in Rome, Sof:Art gallery in Bologna, Flux Factory in New York, and as part of a group show at AROS art museum in Aarhus, Denmark. They have performed on stages at the New Museum’s DEMO Showcase in Manhattan, ZeroSpace in Brooklyn, Standard Vision Studios in Los Angeles, and many underground New York venues. Their performance practice includes solo audiovisual narrative productions as well as collaborations with Club Cringe, Von, Uffie, Kevin Peter He, Kink Out, and Team Rolfes.

With a foot in the world of experimental film and live performance, and the other in fine art and installation, 502 Bad Gateway desires to break the traditionally static, immutable nature of gallery work, by incorporating the real-time responsiveness of interactive live performance. AccessibilityFlux IV is located on the ground floor of 56-21 2nd Street, Long Island City, NY 11101 between the Queens Landing Boathouse & Environmental Center and Gotham Point apartments. The closest bus stop is 2 St/55 Ave on the Q101. The closest subway station is Vernon Blvd-Jackson Ave on the 7 line (purple) and 21st st G line (green). The closest ferry pier is Hunter’s Point South Ferry Landing. A Citibike station is located at Center Blvd & Hunters Point South Ferry Landing. iPark (paid parking) is available on 1-20 56th Ave, Long Island City, NY 11101. There is a public restroom left of our front door.

Opening • Itinerant Signal Institute (Rite of Spring)
2026-08-06 18:00 - 21:00 | Flux IV, 56-21 2nd St, Long Island City
Join us for the opening reception of Itinerant Signal Institute (Rite of Spring), a solo exhibition by Amelia Marzec on Thursday, August 6 from 6 – 9 PM, with a brief artist talk at 7 PM.

Itinerant Signal Institute (Rite of Spring) is a fictional institute and installation, grounded in techno-ecological art. The story of the Institute is told through sculpture, digital images, internet art, microcontrollers, and scientific displays. In it, creatures have emerged from the melting permafrost to join the Institute and return to modern-day cities to examine their climates. The creatures wear headdresses of bones and fossils, inspired by Eastern European carnival costumes that denote the changing of seasons. They acknowledge the effect of human activity on the Arctic Circle, and anticipate increasing climate migration due to military fuel consumption. The Institute tests for environmental toxins to identify places of relative safety, through small hand-built quasi-scientific devices that test the air and soil. The work also addresses queer migration, and re-defining the idea of home in the current political climate. It incorporates plant knowledge to influence the endocrine system, reducing human desire for late-stage capitalism and war at a biological level. Sites tested by the Institute include former military bases, including WWII sites in Europe, and Newtown Creek, the location of one of the United State’s largest oil spills, where the artist’s family lived when they emigrated to New York City. The work evolves as the Institute installs servers in partner organizations as the project moves from place to place.About the Artist

Amelia Marzec is a New York based artist engaging with communications infrastructure to inform a speculative future. Her work has been exhibited at SIGGRAPH, MIT, ISEA (Canada), University of the Arts Helsinki (Finland), ONCE Foundation Contemporary Art Biennial (Spain), NODE Forum for Digital Arts Biennial (Germany), and is part of the New Museum’s Rhizome ArtBase. She has been a resident at Eyebeam, Ox-Bow, Harvestworks, and ZK/U Center for Art and Urbanistics in Berlin. She was a fellow at NYSCA/NYFA, A.I.R. Gallery, a Tow Fellow at Columbia University, a visiting artist at the Center for Integrated Media at Calarts, a grantee of the Research Foundation of CUNY, and a nominee for the World Technology Awards for Art. Her work has been featured in Wired, Make, Hyperallergic, Neural Magazine, Metropolis Magazine, Creators, Time Out New York, and the front page of Reddit. She holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design, and a BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts.AccessibilityFlux IV is located on the ground floor of 56-21 2nd Street, Long Island City, NY 11101 between the Queens Landing Boathouse & Environmental Center and Gotham Point apartments. The closest bus stop is 2 St/55 Ave on the Q101. The closest subway station is Vernon Blvd-Jackson Ave on the 7 line (purple) and 21st st G line (green). The closest ferry pier is Hunter’s Point South Ferry Landing. A Citibike station is located at Center Blvd & Hunters Point South Ferry Landing. iPark (paid parking) is available on 1-20 56th Ave, Long Island City, NY 11101. There is a public restroom left of our front door.

Dark Matters Symposium
2026-08-15 18:30 - 21:00 | Flux IV, 56-21 2nd St, Long Island City
“I plot dark sousveillance as an imaginative place from which to mobilize a critique of racializing surveillance, a critique that takes form in antisurveillance, countersurveillance, and other freedom practices.”

– Simone Brown, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness

Flux Factory is pleased to present the Dark Matters Symposium at Flux IV, featuring the work of Sherese Francis and Tom Tsai. Francis and Tsai were selected from a pool of over 50 applicants responding to the themes of surveillance, anti-surveillance, countersurveillance, and the lived or inherited experience of “being watched.” Francis’s Oracle of Opacity (A Kwantum Performance) is a ritual sonic poetry performance and experimental reading inspired by Edouard Glissant’s concept of opacity (Poetics of Relation) and Octavia Butler’s practice of primitive hypertext. Tsai’s contemporary dance work, A Fantasy of Having Home, informed by hip hop battle sensibilities, was created a decade ago to honor Taiwanese resilience in the face of unceasing threats of war. To meet the moment in 2026, Tsai revives this performance and reframes it around Taiwan’s martial law period, a time of political persecution enforced through extrajudicial arrests and killings, secret police surveillance, and imprisonment.

In Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses.

Symposium Program6:30 PM: Doors open – light refreshments served7:00 PM: Sherese Francis performs7:30 PM: Tom Tsai performs8:00 PM: 10-minute break8:10 PM: Talkback with artists, moderated by Kamari Carter (Artist/Organizer) and Kennedy Hollins Jones (Curator/Writer)8:45 PM: Audience Q&A9:00 PM: End of event

About the ArtistsSherese Francis (she/they) describes themselves as an AlKyMist of the I-Magination, finding expression through poetry, interdisciplinary arts (collage, book and paper arts, sound and performance art), workshop facilitation, editing, and literary curation. Her(e) work takes inspiration from her(e) Afro-Caribbean heritage (Barbados and Dominica), and studies in Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Arts, mythology and etymology. Sherese has published in a variety of publications, including Obsidian, Furious Flower and Women’s Studies Quarterly, has published four chapbooks, and edited a poetry anthology/guided journal, Baby Suggs and a Purple Butterfly. Besides publications, Sherese has had her(e) work featured in various exhibitions and showcases, including from NY Live Arts, York College Arts Gallery, Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, Flux Factory, Mercy Gallery, LMCC Gallery on Governors Island and Ely Center for Contemporary Art.

Tom Tsai’s dance work spans stage, filmmaking, education, and activism, rooted in his Hip Hop, contemporary dance, and Taiwanese identities. Tom has performed his contemporary and B-boy solo works throughout the USA, and internationally in London, Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, and Singapore. He has received support from the City of Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, Ghost Light Residency, and Dance Resource Center’s Homegrown Residency @ The Music Center. He is a 2-time winner at REVERBDance Festival (NYC), and a 2023 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow. Tom has been adjunct dance faculty at Pomona College, Cal State Long Beach, Cal State Fullerton, Chapman University, and NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

About the OrganizersKamari Carter is a New York-based artist working primarily with sound, video, installation, and performance. His practice circumvents materiality and familiarity through a variety of recording and amplification techniques to investigate notions such as space, systems of identity, oppression, control, and surveillance. Driven by the probative nature of perception, Carter’s work seeks to expand narrative structures through sonic stillness and found objects. His work has been exhibited at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Perez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum, Providence, RI; Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ; Flux Factory, Long Island City, NY; Wave Hill, New York; Fridman Gallery, New York; and Automata Arts, Los Angeles, among others, and has been featured in publications including Artnet, Flash Art, Hyperallergic, and Whitewall, among others. Carter holds a BFA from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and an MFA from Columbia University. Kamari Carter is represented by Microscope Gallery in New York City.

Kennedy Hollins Jones is a curator, researcher, and writer based in Brooklyn, NY, whose practice is rooted in the Black radical tradition, performance studies, and literary theory. Their work is drawn to explorations of the asymptotic, or that which exceeds or meets infrastructural, hegemonic, and ‘normative’ limits, and the elegiac, or that which defiantly attempts to decry and bear witness in and to sites of ending. Kennedy is the curatorial assistant at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University and a member of the Archive Ensemble, a group of arts workers, scholars, and cultural practitioners dedicated to fostering physical, epistemological, and political forms of gathering rooted in subaltern and errant modes of being. As the Whitney Independent Study Program Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow, they served as one of the curators for the 2025 capstone exhibition, a grammar of attention. Kennedy was also one of the co-curators of Archive’s presentation for the 2024 Dakar Biennale, a flood is a remembering. They received their master’s in Public Humanities from Brown University and have supported the research, curation, and production of exhibitions and programs at SAVVY Contemporary, NMAAHC at the Smithsonian, Brown Arts Institute, the Miami MoCAAD, and MoMA.

Clara Wiest is a Swiss multidisciplinary artist based in New York, working across fabric, sound, installation, and performance. Her practice includes stage direction, movement direction, and intimacy coordination. Her last solo exhibition explored heartbreak, grief, and care, inviting participants to contribute their own creations and become co-authors of the evolving installation. Wiest’s work is rooted in a curiosity about the body, spirit, and the emotional dynamics within interpersonal relationships. Clara’s work has been shown at MASSMocA, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Brick Theater, Denver Fringe, BRIC Arts Media, MITU580, The Bushwick Starr, IATI Theater.

Dark Matters Symposium is presented as part Kamari Carter’s 2026 NYSCA Fellowship.

Flux Saturday: Hard to Be a God
2026-08-22 15:00 - 19:30 | Flux IV, 56-21 2nd St, Long Island City
Image: Hard to Be a God, 2013. Film still.

Our serial public program and potluck is back! Flux Saturdays are organized by different artists and take many forms, including pop-up exhibitions, performances, screenings, artist presentations and more. We are requesting RSVPs to determine a head count for refreshments but will not turn away guests.Performance with Amelia Marzec3:00 – 4:00 pmPlease join us for a performance from Amelia Marzec’s Itinerant Signal Institute, where visitors will learn to create and distribute a special herbal remedy.

Itinerant Signal Institute (Rite of Spring) is a fictional institute and installation, grounded in techno-ecological art. The story of the Institute is told through sculpture, digital images, internet art, microcontrollers, and scientific displays. In it, creatures have emerged from the melting permafrost to join the Institute and return to modern-day cities to examine their climates. The creatures wear headdresses of bones and fossils, inspired by Eastern European carnival costumes that denote the changing of seasons. They acknowledge the effect of human activity on the Arctic Circle, and anticipate increasing climate migration due to military fuel consumption. The Institute tests for environmental toxins to identify places of relative safety, through small hand-built quasi-scientific devices that test the air and soil. The work also addresses queer migration, and re-defining the idea of home in the current political climate. It incorporates plant knowledge to influence the endocrine system, reducing human desire for late-stage capitalism and war at a biological level. Sites tested by the Institute include former military bases, including WWII sites in Europe, and Newtown Creek, the location of one of the United State’s largest oil spills, where my family lived when they emigrated to New York City. The work evolves as the Institute installs servers in partner organizations as the project moves from place to place.Screening: Hard to Be a God with 502 Bad Gateway4:30-7:30 pm

For one night only, artist duo 502 Bad Gateway will screen Hard to Be a God (dir. Aleksei German, 2013). In the film, a group of scientists travel to a planet of humans stuck in the middle ages. They struggle not to intervene and begin trying to help the society progress. The film is adapted from the book Roadside Picnic, a primary inspiration in 502 Bad Gateway’s recent works.

About the Artists

Amelia Marzec is a New York based artist engaging with communications infrastructure to inform a speculative future. Her work has been exhibited at SIGGRAPH, MIT, ISEA (Canada), University of the Arts Helsinki (Finland), ONCE Foundation Contemporary Art Biennial (Spain), NODE Forum for Digital Arts Biennial (Germany), and is part of the New Museum’s Rhizome ArtBase. She has been a resident at Eyebeam, Ox-Bow, Harvestworks, and ZK/U Center for Art and Urbanistics in Berlin. She was a fellow at NYSCA/NYFA, A.I.R. Gallery, a Tow Fellow at Columbia University, a visiting artist at the Center for Integrated Media at Calarts, a grantee of the Research Foundation of CUNY, and a nominee for the World Technology Awards for Art. Her work has been featured in Wired, Make, Hyperallergic, Neural Magazine, Metropolis Magazine, Creators, Time Out New York, and the front page of Reddit. She holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design, and a BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts.

502 Bad Gateway is the artist duo of Alexander Baumann and Robert Ruth, whose collaborative artistic disciplines include motion capture performance, oil painting, 3D game development, sculpture, vintage tech restoration, building audio synthesizers, animation, and filmmaking. Their practice focuses on integrating their artistic methods with deprecated technologies from many different eras, drawing on the history of usage to underline the intent of the work. Their work has been displayed in solo exhibitions at T293 gallery in Rome, Sof:Art gallery in Bologna, Flux Factory in New York, and as part of a group show at AROS art museum in Aarhus, Denmark. They have performed on stages at the New Museum’s DEMO Showcase in Manhattan, ZeroSpace in Brooklyn, Standard Vision Studios in Los Angeles, and many underground New York venues. Their performance practice includes solo audiovisual narrative productions as well as collaborations with Club Cringe, Von, Uffie, Kevin Peter He, Kink Out, and Team Rolfes. With a foot in the world of experimental film and live performance, and the other in fine art and installation, 502 Bad Gateway desires to break the traditionally static, immutable nature of gallery work, by incorporating the real-time responsiveness of interactive live performance

This event takes place in conjunction with Flux IV‘s current exhibitions, Itinerant Signal Institute (Rite of Spring) and 502 Bad Gateway: Error is Shadow.

Flux Saturday: In The End, And In Minutes
2026-08-29 13:00 - 19:00 | Flux IV, 56-21 2nd St, Long Island City
Image: 502 Bad Gateway, In The End, And In Minutes, 2026. Courtesy of the artists.

Our serial public program and potluck is back! Flux Saturdays are organized by different artists and take many forms, including pop-up exhibitions, performances, screenings, artist presentations and more.

Underground Underwater Costume Workshop1:00 – 7:00 pm

Come make something strange and otherworldly fitting of the city’s underwater universe with Piper Amphora, the artist duo behind Flux IV’s upcoming theatrical performance, Underground and Underwater. Drawing on techniques from puppetry, costume, and theater fabrication, participants will transform everyday, found materials into fantastical wearables inspired by New York City’s buried waterways. Costumes created in this workshop will become part of Underground and Underwater‘s spectacular last act: a 100+ person Orphic night parade along the Hunter’s Point waterfront. No RSVP required! Free and open to all skill levels. No materials needed but attendees are welcome to bring their own. Underground and Underwater will take place on September 12 and 13, 2026 at Flux IV.

Closing Party: Error is Shadow with 502 Bad Gateway5:00 – 7:00 pm

Join us for the closing of the exhibition Error is Shadow with an arcade game tournament hosted by 502 Bad Gateway. Play In The End, And In Minutes, the artists’ roguelike deckbuilder, and compete to become the best sector administrator. Prizes will be awarded to the top players.

This event takes place in conjunction with Flux IV‘s current exhibitions, Itinerant Signal Institute (Rite of Spring) and 502 Bad Gateway: Error is Shadow.

Flux Sunday: Closing the Autonomous Zone
2026-08-30 12:00 - 19:00 | Flux IV, 56-21 2nd St, Long Island City
Image: Amelia Marzec, 2026.

Our serial public program and potluck is back! Flux Saturdays and Sundays are organized by different artists and take many forms, including pop-up exhibitions, performances, screenings, artist presentations and more.Closing Party: Itinerant Signal Institute (Rite of Spring)12:00 – 6:00 pm

Last day of the exhibition Itinerant Signal Institute (Rite of Spring) and closing of the Autonomous Zone at Flux IV.

The presence of the flag in the exhibition demarcates the gallery area as an autonomous zone of the Itinerant Signal Institute. In this area, information on greenhouse gases are being broadcast live, at a time when funding and information on air quality are being removed. The zone also is a safe space for queer people affected by recent policy shifts. The Institute intermittently provides oranges as preventative healthcare, in addition to remedies manufactured by the organization. During this event, you are invited to bring your own artwork and ideas that you wish to exist in the autonomous zone.

Underground Underwater Costume Workshop1:00 – 7:00 pm

Come make something strange and otherworldly fitting of the city’s underwater universe with Piper Amphora, the artist duo behind Flux IV’s upcoming theatrical performance, Underground and Underwater. Drawing on techniques from puppetry, costume, and theater fabrication, participants will transform everyday, found materials into fantastical wearables inspired by New York City’s buried waterways. Costumes created in this workshop will become part of Underground and Underwater‘s spectacular last act: a 100+ person Orphic night parade along the Hunter’s Point waterfront. No RSVP required! Free and open to all skill levels. No materials needed but attendees are welcome to bring their own. Underground and Underwater will take place on September 12 and 13, 2026 at Flux IV.

This event takes place in conjunction with Flux IV‘s current exhibitions, Itinerant Signal Institute (Rite of Spring) and 502 Bad Gateway: Error is Shadow.

Underground Underwater Costume Workshop
2026-09-05 13:00 - 19:00 | Flux IV, 56-21 2nd St, Long Island City
Come make something strange and otherworldly fitting of the city’s underwater universe with Piper Amphora, the artist duo behind Flux IV’s upcoming theatrical performance, Underground Underwater. Drawing on techniques from puppetry, costume, and theater fabrication, participants will transform everyday, found materials into fantastical wearables inspired by New York City’s buried waterways. Costumes created in this workshop will become part of Underground and Underwater‘s spectacular last act: a 100+ person Orphic night parade along the Hunter’s Point waterfront. No RSVP required! Free and open to all skill levels. No materials needed but attendees are welcome to bring their own.

Underground Underwater will take place on September 12 and 13, 2026 at Flux IV.

Underground Underwater Costume Workshop
2026-09-06 13:00 - 19:00 | Flux IV, 56-21 2nd St, Long Island City
Come make something strange and otherworldly fitting of the city’s underwater universe with Piper Amphora, the artist duo behind Flux IV’s upcoming theatrical performance, Underground and Underwater. Drawing on techniques from puppetry, costume, and theater fabrication, participants will transform everyday, found materials into fantastical wearables inspired by New York City’s buried waterways. Costumes created in this workshop will become part of Underground and Underwater‘s spectacular last act: a 100+ person Orphic night parade along the Hunter’s Point waterfront. No RSVP required! Free and open to all skill levels. No materials needed but attendees are welcome to bring their own.

Underground and Underwater will take place on September 12 and 13, 2026 at Flux IV.

Out of Sight: Social & Architectural Camouflage
2026-09-16 18:30 - 20:30 | Czech Center New York, 321 E 73rd Street, New York, New York, 10021
Curated in collaboration with Eva Slabá, the evening brings together four artists: Lukáš Šmejkal, Anna Černíková, Norbert Kuki and Salma Jamal Moushum. All four are united by an interest in the tension between visible surface and hidden interior, the theme of social and architectural camouflage, and the uncovering of systems that remain hidden from ordinary view.

Šmejkal’s and Moushum’s artist talks, Černíková’s sound performance, and a screening of Kuki’s latest film will lead into an informal gathering in Czech Center New York. This themed evening puts into dialogue four artistic approaches exploring what happens beneath the surface – whether that’s building façades, the façades of social norms, or institutional prejudice. While Šmejkal deconstructs the technical infrastructure hidden behind the walls of residential buildings, Moushum illuminates how community art and indigenous ecological knowledge subvert institutional prejudice, Černíková seeks an inner space of freedom through daydreaming in a hyper-capitalist city, and Kuki uncovers authentic, non-fetishized stories of Roma identity from within the community.

Program

6:30–7:30 PM | Artist Talks: Lukáš Šmejkal and Salma Jamal Moushum

Painter Lukáš Šmejkal will present his research focusing on urban infrastructure and architectural camouflage in New York. He will discuss the tension between the city’s aesthetic surface and its hidden technological core. He will also present the results of his field research, which focused on specific architectural phenomena such as 58 Joralemon Street (the facade of a residential building), Bruckner Boulevard (a mock-up for electrical substations) and the Strecker Laboratory (the use of a historic monument to house a metro transformer).

Salma Jamal Moushum will introduce the practice of Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts, a community-based arts organization working in the village of Balia in northern Bangladesh since 2001. Through a talk accompanied by short film excerpts, she will talk about Gidree Bawlee’s long-term, collaborative approach to artmaking with local communities, bringing contemporary artistic processes into conversation with ecological knowledge, oral traditions, craft, performance, and everyday rural life. She will also discuss her recent project Shak Pitari (Wild Leaves), created with women and young people in Balia around the disappearing knowledge of uncultivated edible plants.

7:30–8:05 PM | Film Screening: Štefi, Ten Days of FreedomNorbert Kuki / 2025 / 33 min.

Norbert Kuki will present his latest audiovisual documentary work Štefi, Ten Days of Freedom. The documentary tells the story of a prisoner who stood out for his musical talent. As the documentary unfolds, Stefi gradually opens up and shares his personal story, revealing how he became a victim of a dysfunctional system and exploring the lasting scars it has left on him.

8:30 PM | Sound Performance by Anna Černíková & Gathering

Bohemian National Hall will become a space for two distinct but thematically connected explorations of inner worlds and hidden identity.Anna Černíková (performing under the pseudonym A/C) will present a sound performance based on her New York project Daydream Nation. Sound collage and lo-fi aesthetics offer a moment of pause from constant digital stimulation, opening a space for daydreaming.

Presented by the Czech Center New York, the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (UMPRUM), Flux Factory, and Residency Unlimited.

Anna Černíková

Czech artist and graduate from Visual Arts III at UMPRUM in Prague in 2025. Her work combines moving image, music, performance, and installation. She deals with the fluidity of identity, corporeality, and cultural memory. Her works move between dream and reality, documentary and fiction, often using lo-fi aesthetics and glitch.

Norbert Kuki

Slovak Roma artist and graduate of the Department of Intermedia at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (VŠVU) in Bratislava. In 2026 he became one of the laureates of the Oskár Čepan Award. His work moves between social sculpture, activism, and rap. His art redefines contemporary Roma identity through a deep, non-fetishizing relationship with the community, built on long-term exchange.

Salma Jamal Moushum

Bangladesh-based artistic researcher whose practice explores ecology, memory, gender and collective knowledge. She co-runs Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts, shaping long-term artistic processes rooted in rural communities in northern Bangladesh. Her recent project, Shak Pitari (Wild Leaves), engages with women elders’ knowledge of uncultivated edible plants. She is currently an Asian Cultural Council Fellow in New York.

Lukáš Šmejkal

Czech artist and graduate of Studio of Fine Arts II at UMPRUM in Prague. In his painting, he has long explored the relationship between landscape, the human body, and technology. He transforms the geometric elements of energy infrastructure into organic, biomorphic structures in which technical precision merges with intuitive lines.

This event is presented by the Czech Center New York, the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (UMPRUM), Flux Factory, and Residency Unlimited.

Urban Water Awareness Day
2026-09-19 15:30 - 20:00 | Flux IV, 56-21 2nd St, Long Island City
Taking the NYC Ferry at dusk, as glimmering sunrays soak into the East River rippling beneath the fractured reflection of the Manhattan skyline, one is reminded that New York is a city profoundly shaped by water. Beneath its rivers, estuaries, canals, and harbors accumulate submerged layered histories of industry, public life and ecological transformation. What remains beneath the surface?

Urban Water Awareness Day is a public program consisting of an urban waterfront walk, panel discussion, workshop, and film screening presented in conjunction with New York Climate Week. The program brings together artists, architects, urbanists, environmental advocates, and community organizations, to examine water as a civic, social, and cultural framework, not merely a technical system. Through public dialogue, site-based learning, architectural design, and artistic practice, it reflects on municipal water as space for environmental justice, climate resilience, urban policy, and public health alongside models for ecological restoration and climate-adaptive design. This program reveals how water continues to shape everyday life and how some of the city’s most pressing environmental, social, and political challenges converge in the municipal waters of a warming New York City. It is a joint initiative of Shared Grounds and ECO Solidarity, a collaborative project represented by the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York, Flux Factory, and the Polish Cultural Institute New York.

Often hidden beneath streets and woven into the built environment, water infrastructure remains largely invisible despite its profound influence on public health, urban development, and climate adaptation. These systems, ranging from reservoirs and waterways to public pools, waterfronts, and estuaries, have shaped the growth, memory, and daily life of New York City for generations. As rising temperatures, extreme weather events, and aging infrastructure put increasing pressure on urban environments, questions of stewardship and resilience become ever more urgent. Urban Water Awareness Day proves that cultural programs play an important role in this context by making invisible systems visible, fostering public awareness, and encouraging new ways of imagining climate resilience in the city.

In Public Pools research project, Karolina Częczek reimagines New York City’s municipal pools as essential civic and ecological infrastructure beyond their seasonal use. The research explores the history, form, and social and cultural aspects of the swimming pool as an architectural type. The pool serves as a device to engage specific aspects of public space and architectural invention while revealing the undercurrents of urban policy.

The project is illustrated by a catalog of New York City public pools, photographs and writings. Through the NYC Water Map, the project reveals the city’s interconnected watershed, from upstate reservoirs to neighborhood pools, demonstrating how it influences public health, heat mitigation, and everyday urban life. The project also proposes practical, climate-adaptive solutions built upon the city’s existing water systems. These speculative proposals applied to five distinct typologies of New York City pools, ranging from programmatic extensions to architectural interventions, foster use of public amenities and promote climate resiliency.

Expanding this perspective from citywide water infrastructure to neighborhood landscapes, Interval Projects explores how architecture can reconnect cities with ecological systems. The New York–based practice, founded by Marlisa Wise and Benedict Clouette, works at the intersection of architecture, urban ecology, and public space, transforming overlooked sites into resilient civic landscapes. Their work on the Dutch Kills Loop in Long Island City proves how ecological restoration, adaptive design, and public access can reimagine post-industrial waterfronts in response to climate change.

Together, Karolina Częczek‘s Public Pools and Interval Projects’ vision for the Dutch Kills Loop reframe urban water as shared civic infrastructure. Through architecture, ecological restoration, and cultural programming, Urban Water Awareness Day explores how design can strengthen public health, expand access to the waterfront, and foster more resilient relationships between cities, freight rail, hidden waterways and community-led reclamation.

Newtown Creek: case study of environmental justice in Long Island City and Greenpoint

Newtown Creek, a 3.8-mile tidal estuary bordering Long Island City and Greenpoint, has evolved from a vital wetland into one of New York City’s most polluted waterways and a federally designated Superfund site. Decades of industrial contamination, combined sewer overflows, and aging water infrastructure have made the creek increasingly vulnerable to rising sea levels and more frequent extreme weather events. In response, the Newtown Creek Alliance has led community-driven efforts to restore habitats, expand waterfront access, and advance green infrastructure—exemplifying how ecological restoration, civic stewardship, and public engagement can contribute to a more resilient urban future.

Program

Saturday, September 19, 2026, 3:30–8:00 PM

Urban Waterfront Walk3:30–5:30 PM

Led by Hart Mankin, the Newtown Creek Alliance Environmental Educator, the educational waterfront walk explores Newtown Creek and Dutch Kills as living case studies of waterfront contamination, climate vulnerability, and environmental justice, tracing one of New York City’s most historically industrialized waterways as it undergoes ecological restoration. Starting at Hunters Point Avenue, the route passes the Dutch Kills Loop beneath the Long Island Expressway, continues along the Montauk Cut-Off rail corridor and the Borden Avenue waterfront, before concluding at Flux IV. Together, these sites reveal the layered relationship between freight rail, hidden waterways and community-led reclamation. Experiencing the creek firsthand transforms an often-invisible infrastructure into a living landscape where environmental history, urban planning, and public space converge.

Panel Discussion & Q&A5:30–6:30 PM

A public conversation examining water as civic infrastructure and a catalyst for environmental resilience, public health, and community well-being. Participants include architect Karolina Częczek (Public Pools), architects Marlisa Wise and Benedict Clouette of Interval Projects in conversation moderated by Paula Vilaplana de Miguel, Assistant Curator at the Department of Architecture and Design of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA).

An exhibition featuring selections from Public Pools by Karolina Częczek and Anna Morgowicz will be on view at Flux IV from September 18-20, 2026.

Film Screening6:30–8:00 PM

Screening of (2026) from Remedies by Sasha Huber and Petri Saarikko. Through moving image, the work reflects on ecology, healing, memory, and the complex relationships between humans and the environments they inhabit.

Workshop6:30–8:00 PM

Water Portraits of Queens: A Community Ecology Archive by Adelle Yingxi Lin, is an interactive installation and performance that weaves together community narratives, multilingual calligraphy, and Newtown Creek’s changing ecology into a collective portrait of Queens through gestures of collective healing, and environmental care.

Reception6:30–8:00 PM

An informal gathering that brings together artists, architects, designers, environmental advocates, researchers, and community members for continued conversation and the exchange of ideas.

Exhibition

September 18–20 2026Source Materials presented by GBS Bioart, featuring Public Pools, with drawings by Karolina Częczek & Only If and photographs by Anna Morgowicz.

The Genspace Biomaterials Studio (GBS) presents the GBS Bioart Exhibition, featuring artists who work with biomaterials such as mycelium, SCOBY, biocement, natural dyes, and food waste. At the intersection of art, science, and sustainability, the exhibition showcases emerging material practices that address ecological challenges and envision new relationships between design, the environment, and the living world.

Participants

Panel Speakers

Karolina Częczek, Only If Architecture, Public Pools

Karolina Częczek is an architect and Principal at Only If, a New York City-based design practice for architecture and urbanism. Only If’s projects span a range of different types and scales, from single- and multiple-family housing to larger-scale urban planning, research, and speculation. In 2023 Only If’s People’s Pool project was part of the inaugural exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, “Architecture Now: New York, New Publics,” featuring projects that envision a more accessible, sustainable, and equitable New York. Karolina is also a Critic at the Yale School of Architecture and previously worked at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam and Hong Kong.

Only If Architecture is a New York based architecture and design practice founded by architect Karolina Częczek. Working across architecture, urbanism, research, and public space, the studio explores how design can address contemporary environmental and social challenges. Through projects that connect civic infrastructure, ecology, and public life, Only If develops innovative approaches to climate adaptation and urban resilience.

The Public Pools research explores the history, form, and social and cultural aspects of the swimming pool as an architectural type. The pool serves as a device to engage specific aspects of public space and architectural invention while revealing the undercurrents of urban policy. The research is organized as a catalog of New York City public pools, and is illustrated by photographs and writings highlighting broader issues related to urban waters. It is accompanied by speculative proposals, ranging from architectural interventions to programmatic extensions, applied to five distinct typologies of New York City pools. This project aims to spark a broader public conversation around the importance of free and accessible spaces for public recreation, as well as issues related to climate resiliency and city planning.

Interval Projects, Marlisa Wise and Benedict Clouette

Interval Projects is a New York-based architecture and urbanism practice founded by Marlisa Wise and Benedict Clouette. Working at the intersection of design, public space, and environmental justice, the practice collaborates with municipalities, advocacy organizations, and local communities to develop projects that connect architecture with civic engagement, ecological restoration, and public access to urban landscapes.

Their work spans adaptive reuse, community-led planning, environmental remediation, and waterfront design. Notable projects include the Dutch Kills Loop in Long Island City—a vision for transforming an overlooked industrial corridor into publicly accessible open space—as well as environmental restoration initiatives for the Silver Bow Creek Superfund Site in Montana. Through research, design, and public collaboration, Interval Projects explores how architecture can support more equitable and resilient urban futures.

Moderator: Paula Vilaplana de Miguel Assistant Curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), Department of Architecture and Design

Paula Vilaplana de Miguel is a curator, cultural strategist, and creative director working across architecture and design, technology, and contemporary art. Paula currently serves as Assistant Curator at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), where she has developed projects including Peggy Weil: Core Memory; The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower; Down to Earth, and Body Constructs. She has developed projects for institutions such as the Shanghai Art Biennial, The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Venice Architecture Biennial, and Triennale Milano, and Ca2M, among others and her work has been published internationally.

Workshop: Adelle Yingxi Lin – Water Portraits of Queens: A Community Ecology Archive

Adelle Yingxi Lin is a Malaysian artist and technologist whose work bridges performance, language, and participatory systems. Through installation, embodied research, and public ritual, she explores how cultural memory, technology, and collective experience shape meaning. Her practice develops forms that foreground care, ritual, and relation.

Water Portraits of Queens: A Community Ecology Archive is a participatory installation and performance project in which Queens residents create calligraphic textiles shaped by community stories and Newtown Creek’s shifting water chemistry. The work explores how place, language, and environmental conditions co-author a shared cultural archive. For this workshop, Adelle invites participants to write gestures of healing in their own languages and place them into water, where they are transformed into a collective portrait of the borough shaped by memory, ecology, and care.

Film: Sasha Huber & Petri Saarikko – Sanctuary, Mist (2026) from Remedies

Sasha Huber (b. 1975) is a Helsinki-based internationally recognised visual artist-researcher of Swiss-Haitian heritage. Huber‘s work is concerned with the politics of memory, care and belonging in relation to colonial residues left in the environment. Connecting history and the present, she uses and responds to archival material within a layered creative practice that encompasses performance-based reparative interventions, video, photography, and collaborations. Huber also usurps the staple gun, aware of its symbolic significance as a weapon, while offering the potential to renegotiate unequal power dynamics and the possibility of repair, symbolically stitching wounds together (pain-things). Known for her artistic research contribution to the “Demounting Louis Agassiz” campaign, she is aiming at reassessing the glaciologist’s contentious racist heritage. She holds an MA in visual culture from Aalto University in Helsinki and is presently undertaking a practice-based PhD in artistic research at Zurich University of the Arts.

Petri Saarikko (b. 1973) is Helsinki-based artist and designer. In his site-specific installations, Saarikko combines social commentary with his work as a designer and his background in new media. His work is highly performative in nature. Saarikko does not shy away from provocation. He often challenges ideas of national identity, artistic authorship or official political discourses by changing their context and thus showing the true, artificial nature of these phenomena. His work seeks to expose power relations, to make room for individual narratives, and takes a stand on behalf of equality.

Sasha Huber and Petri Saarikko collaborate regularly in a creative partnership under the name Remedies. Together they have initiated the long-term project Remedies Universe (since 2011) which explores aural family-knowledge in different geographical and cultural contexts and been invited to artist residencies around the world. In 2018, Huber was the recipient of a State Art Award from the Arts Promotion Centre Finland. In 2021–2024 her work is touring under the title “You Name It”, produced by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto and Autograph in London. A comprehensive book with the same title was published by Mousse Publishing in November 2022. Sasha Huber’s work is continued to be supported by Arts Promotion Center Finland through a long-term grant. At Urban Water Awareness Day, Remedies will be showing (2026), a one channel video. Sanctuary, Mist was commissioned by the 2nd Helsinki Biennale in 2023 and this is the documentation of the generative art installation filmed by Petri Saarikko. The new video work was commissioned for their exhibition in Germany, entitled Shelter on view September 18-November 8, 2026 at the Galerie für Gegenwartskunst, Freiburg, Germany. It focuses on colonial power structures and their lasting impact. Through their work, the two artists explore artistic and Indigenous practices that open up new narratives of solidarity.

Urban Waterfront Walk

Newtown Creek Alliance is a community-based organization dedicated to restoring, revealing, and revitalizing Newtown Creek. We work to restore community health, water quality, habitat, access, and vibrant commerce along Newtown Creek. Since 2002, the Alliance has served as a catalyst for effective community action.

Exhibition: About GBS at Genspace Bioart

GBS (Grow Beyond Soil) is a community-driven biomaterials research group at Genspace Bioart exploring the intersection of biology, design, and material innovation. Through collaborative research, experimentation, and its annual six-month Bioart Incubator, GBS brings together artists, designers, scientists, and community biolabs to develop sustainable biomaterials and imagine future ecological approaches to making. Founded in 2009, Genspace Bioart is the world’s first community biology laboratory. Based in New York City, it provides hands-on STEAM education, public programs, and collaborative research opportunities that make the life sciences accessible to artists, researchers, educators, entrepreneurs, and the broader public while fostering innovation across biotechnology, neuroscience, genomics, and environmental science.

Partners

Shared Grounds is a recurring experimental exhibition initiated by curators Elina Suoyrjö (formerly at the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York) and Meghana Karnik (Flux Factory). Informed by eco-feminist thought, the project speculates on placemaking through interspecies alliances and shared knowledge, and imagines a public realm shaped by humans and nonhumans alike. Each edition gathers a new group of Finnish and New York–based artists, who begin their research independently but share a conviction to live interdependently and to build ways of sharing space and understanding one another.

The exhibition grew out of an interest in the complexity of public space in a city like New York. It asks who has access to the public realm, how we are allowed to use it, and how space is shared. The artists are politically conscious and critical of the present, but approach these questions through harmonious, humorous, empathetic, or devotional means rather than irony or cynicism. Shared Grounds is a collaboration between the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York and the Flux Factory artist collective.

ECO Solidarity is an award-winning international platform of the Polish Cultural Institute New York, founded in 2020 in partnership with WantedDesign, Studio Rygalik, and the European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC). Exploring the role of design, architecture, and contemporary culture in addressing climate resilience, public health, and environmental sustainability, the initiative brings together leading architects, designers, artists, and researchers through exhibitions, talks, workshops, and public programs.

Supported by two consecutive EUNIC Cluster Fund Awards, ECO Solidarity received the ICFF Editors’ Award for Best Booth and was recognized by Dezeen as one of the “12 Things to See and Do” during NYCxDESIGN and by SixtySix Magazine in its “Best of NYCxDesign” selection (2023). The initiative’s name draws inspiration from Poland’s historic Solidarność movement, reflecting a belief that collective action and cross-disciplinary collaboration can help shape more resilient, equitable, and sustainable futures.

Finnish Cultural Institute in New York works across the fields of contemporary art, design and architecture, creating dialogue between Finnish and American professionals and audiences. Founded in 1990, the Institute has grown from a residency program to an organization commissioning large-scale projects and events that foster critical dialogue and work to build support for professionals in architecture, design and contemporary art.

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.

Polish Cultural Institute New York (established 2000) is a diplomatic mission of the Republic of Poland to the United States operating under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The PCINY’s mission is to share Polish heritage, history, and art with American audiences and to promote Poland’s contributions to world culture. The Institute initiates, supports, and promotes collaboration between Poland and the United States in various fields, including visual art, design, film, theater, dance, literature, and music, as well as other areas of intellectual and social life.

Newtown Creek Alliance is a community-based organization dedicated to restoring, revealing, and revitalizing Newtown Creek, a 3.8-mile tidal estuary and federally designated Superfund site bordering Brooklyn and Queens. Since 2002, the Alliance has served as a catalyst for effective community action, working to restore water quality, habitat, public access, and commerce along the creek. Our programs combine hands-on ecological restoration with environmental education, including school field trips, guided walking tours, and public stewardship events. Through advocacy, monitoring, and community partnerships, NCA works to ensure Newtown Creek’s recovery reflects the needs and voices of the neighborhoods it runs through.

The Hunters Point Parks Conservancy enhances, activates, and advocates for the parks and waterfront of Long Island City, bringing communities together, protecting vital outdoor spaces, and ensuring lasting access for all. Hunters Point Parks Conservancy was formed in 1998 by a group of dedicated Long Island City residents determined to improve the quality of life at the waterfront in Hunter’s Point, Long Island City. We run over 200 free programs a year for the community, including yoga and fitness sessions, kids programs, movie nights, and art classes, and bring volunteers to the parks to help support the local ecosystem. We also run environmental education, public paddle, and advocacy programs from the Queens Landing Boathouse and Environmental Center.

WantedDesign, founded in 2011, has evolved into a membership program. It is a dynamic connector and amplifier for global design, fostering creative synergy and serving as a pivotal crossroad for the international design community.
