Shared Grounds
June 28 – August 10, 2025
Hunter’s Point South Park (along Center Blvd, south of 54th Avenue), Long Island City, NY
Opening Performances: Saturday, June 28, 2025, 3:00 – 8:00 pm
Flux Factory and Finnish Cultural Institute in New York (FCINY) 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.
Shared Grounds 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.
Press
Cultbytes: Curators Reformulate The Social Contract
A.E. Chapman
Impulse Magazine: Face to Face (July 2025): Jodie Lyn-Kee Chow
Xuezhu Jenny Wang
Performance Documentation
Top to bottom: Lotta Petronella, Kastehelmi Korpijaakko, Carmen Baltzar, Jemila MacEwan, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow
Photography: Yann Chashanovski
Opening Performances Schedule
Link: Map of Performances
3:00 – 3:30 pm: Lotta Petronella, sparrows and mystics
Location: Luminescence Sculpture (Center Blvd, between 54th & 55th Aves)
A choir with neighbors of Hunter’s Point
3:45 – 4:15 pm: Kastehelmi Korpijaakko, Negotation (an attempt)
Location: Salt Marsh in Hunter’s Point South Extension (Center Blvd, between 55th & 56th Aves)
A press conference by the waterfront
4:30 – 5:00 pm: Carmen Baltzar, nothing to be seen (a closed practice), accompanied by Sandy Williams IV
Location: Take the public walkway off 2nd Street (between the Kayak Ramp and Flux IV) to view the performative action behind Flux IV (56-21 2nd St)
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, ZERO: THE BIRTH OF VENIS with live music by ExquisiteCorp
Location: Hunter’s Point South Kayak Ramp (near 2nd St & 56th Ave)
A microbial awakening
A eukaryotic extinction
A molecular revenge
6:15 – 8:00 pm: Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, The Picnic: Harvest of the Soft Sweet Sound
Location: The Park of Barnie in Hunter’s Point South Extension (near Center Blvd, between 55th & 56th Aves)
Cast: 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
Accessibility: All performances take place in Hunter’s Point South Park (Center Blvd, south of 54th Avenue). The closest subway station is the Vernon-Jackson stop on the 7 (purple) line. The nearest ferry stop is on the East River Ferry to Hunter’s Point South Park. There are public restrooms nextdoor to Flux IV (56-21 2nd Street, LIC) and by the East River ferry stop.
About the Artists
Carmen Baltzar is an artist working in film, writing and performative text forms. Carmen’s work flows through and beyond time, the body, rhythm, alternate matriarchal 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 early 2026. Carmen’s first fiction short film All the Love in my Body follows two young Romani sisters as they sell 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.
About the Curators
Elina Suoyrjö is a Finnish curator, writer, and researcher whose intersectional feminist practice builds upon close dialogue and collaboration with artists. Working most often site- and situation-specifically, she is interested above all in what art does and how art feels. Her recent projects have explored ecofeminisms, hydrofeminisms, the occult in art, and the creation of transformative energies through curatorial work. Suoyrjö holds an MA in both History of Art and Gender Studies from the University of Helsinki, an MA in Curating Art from Stockholm University, and a PhD in feminist curating from Middlesex University, London. She has curated exhibitions and events with collaborators and venues including Basel Social Club, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New Art Dealers Alliance, Tenthaus Oslo, and HAM Helsinki Art Museum. From 2020 – 2025, Suoyrjö was Director of Programs at FCINY.
Meghana Karnik is an curator, researcher, and writer based in New York City, exploring paradoxes between art and social change, spirituality and economy, lived experience and institutional process. Studying alternative art histories, arts funding, free expression, and artist-run spaces; she follows a lineage of those working at the intersection of curating and institution-building. An alumna of the de Appel Curatorial Programme 2023 (Amsterdam), Karnik holds an MA in Arts Administration from Columbia University, a BA in Political Science and Art History from Case Western Reserve University, and completed a BFA Thesis & Exhibition as a cross-registrant of Cleveland Institute of Art. She has curated at LMCC Arts Center on Governors Island, De Appel Amsterdam, SUNY Purchase, Cleveland Institute of Art, FCCA Prague, and EFA Project Space. Karnik is currently Curator & Exhibitions Director at Flux Factory.
Presenters and Community Partners
About Finnish Cultural Institute in New York
The 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. www.fciny.org
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. www.fluxfactory.org
About Queens Landing Boathouse & Environmental Center
The environmental education team at Hunter’s Point South Conservancy leads various environmental programming throughout the year. We conduct nature walks, speaker talks, environmental art classes, and more. https://www.hunterspointparks.org/environmental-education
About Secret Riso Club
Secret Riso Club (SRC) is an artist-run space that fosters a creative practice at the intersection of art, design, learning, publishing, printing, activism, and community building. SRC is run in collaboration between Gonzalo Guerrero and Tara Ridgedell. https://secretrisoclub.com/
Press Inquiries: Meghana Karnik, Curator & Exhibitions Director | meghana@fluxfactory.org