Stephanie Kayal & Abed Kobeissy’s Galactic Crush 2 wins ZKB Patronage Prize

We are incredibly proud to announce that Galactic Crush 2: Into the Cold, Stephanie Kayal & Abed Kobeissy‘s space odyssey about love, failure, and the longing to escape a world in ruins, has won the ZKB Patronage Prize at the Zürcher Theater Spektakel. The prize worth 30.000 CHF was awarded by an international jury consisting of Alia Alzougbi, Ophelia Jiadai Huang, Jessie Mill, Fatima Moumouni and Veronika Skliarova. They described the piece as a “collective examination of our responsibility.” You can read their full statement below.

We loved “Galactic Crush 2: Into the Cold” for its honesty about the fatigue and rage of wartime. It is a retrofuturistic exploration of memory and hope in the face of perpetual failure. On board a DIY spaceship, Stéphanie Kayal and Abed Kobeissy take us on an exercise of shared reckoning to an imagined future of coldness and solitude. The artists show us that distance is a privilege when people live not only in different levels of risk, but in fundamentally different time and space dimensions.
The science fiction and comic genre sits in deliberate contrast to these heavy inquiries. Along with their android companion, Stéphanieand Abed offer playfulness and complexity in a timeloop without escape, watching catastrophes unfolding from space as resources grow scarce.
The piece withdraws from direct images of nightmares in favor of sounds, fragmented memories, and humour, a strategy that acknowledges the difficulty of continuing artistic practice when homelands are being abandoned and lost. Galactic Crush 2 addresses the turbulence and atrocity unfolding in the world, but it does so from a planetary perspective that extends beyond borders. What if we all were aboard this one spaceship, together, facing an uncertain future?