Rafal Skoczek
Text: Oskar Weiss
In A very brutal red carpet?, Rafal Skoczek uses the very title of his long-planned but as yet unrealized project to question its necessity or feasibility. Perhaps he is also questioning whether viewers walking across it would even accept it?
This architectural installation, located in the backyard at Sihlquai 125, features a 10-meter-long, 50-centimeter-wide red concrete line designed to subtly commemorate the countless stories and ongoing initiatives of this place. It is a red carpet where visitors can take center stage for ten steps. Monolithic, yet accessible.
Still known to many within the city’s cultural landscape as an art school, the venue evolved—in part due to the ZHdK’s move from this central location to a “new” idea of Zurich—into a socially engaged open-space and a uniquely diverse gathering place within the city.
Clearly articulated and skillfully visualized, Rafal Skoczek’s submission convinced the jury in terms of both content and form. In these uncertain times, what still testifies to one of the last of these places? A very brutal red carpet?
Roman Selim Khereddine
Text: Jasmine Gregory
Roman Selim Khereddine’s unrealized project originates from an invitation to present a solo exhibition at a German Kunstverein, where he proposed to collaborate with local civic associations and relocate their rituals such as fraternity gatherings, athletic drills, and dog training into the exhibition space. Through this displacement, the work aimed to expose structures of discipline, exclusion, and collective identity embedded in social and institutional forms. What begins as a site specific investigation into the social fabric of a German city shifts, following the artist’s decision to withdraw from the exhibition, into a reflection on the institutional conditions that shape artistic production.
The jury was particularly compelled by the project’s capacity to raise questions around censorship and the relationship between artist and institution. By ultimately cancelling the show, Khereddine foregrounds the ethical stakes of participation and resists the instrumentalization of critical practices within contested institutional frameworks. The project operates not only as an unrealized exhibition, but as a precise intervention into the dynamics of visibility, power, and dissent, prompting a necessary reconsideration of how institutions engage with political realities and the responsibilities they bear.
Pilar Quinteros
Text: Chus Martínez
Searching the Middle by Pilar Quinteros is a film and installation that stages the Rhine as a threshold where history, myth, and power intersect. Archival material on supervised archaeological searches and the persecution of alleged witches in the city of Basel merge to create a performance action in the project’s central gesture: releasing monumental golden brooches into the river. The symbolical libration of museum relics into the public space of the river acts on today’s urgent need to reimagine public space as a site of participation rather than control.
By staging the Rhine as a contested, transitional zone—historically marked by surveillance, punishment, and regulated excavation—Pilar Quinteros exposes how public spaces are often structured through exclusion and authority. Quinteros proposes a symbolic reversal: the release of the brooches transforms the river into a shared, unpredictable environment where meaning is no longer fixed but collectively reactivated. Its pertinence lies in addressing how institutions regulate memory, how histories of violence persist in public space, and how fiction can operate as a method to question official narratives and recover suppressed meanings.
Noah Krummenacher
Text: Mitchell Anderson
How many fog machines would it take to alter the weather forecast? reconsiders visibility, received logic, and humanity’s fraught relationship with the environment through a poetically simple gesture, an outdoor installation that produces artificial fog only when natural fog is already present. Noah Krummenacher’s proposal stages a subtle redundancy, an amplification bordering on futility, colliding technological intervention with atmospheric contingency.
His subverting of the extractive, macho legacy of land art, redirects attention from permanence and control toward transience. Paradoxically, the piece celebrates the unpredictable rhythms of the natural world while exposing a collective, and ultimately futile, desire to regulate, predict, and schedule them. The jury was specifically won over by Krummenacher’s speculative clarity—the project’s immaterial yet vividly imaginable form, which exists as convincingly in unrealized thought as it might in reality.
Kollektiv Haus Gawaling
Text: Tasnim Baghdadi
The Fifths Sister reimagines memory and authorship through a diasporic, intergenerational lens. Centered on the collectively invented figure of an absent “fifth sister,” it proposes a multilayered installation spanning documentary, speculative fabulation, and a living archive to explore loss, displacement, and unrealized life trajectories, closely aligned with the Prize’s focus on unrealized potential.
Drawing on oral testimony, embodied memory, and generative media, the project advances absence as a method – giving form to lives not lived, stories not recorded, and futures that never came into being. It foregrounds cognitive difference, speculation, and relational knowledge as active modes of knowledge production, positioning absence as a generative site where memory and imagination converge, allowing new epistemologies and forms of collective narration to emerge. Formally, the proposal demonstrates a strong integration of media and concept, with generative technologies extending oral traditions.
The jury commended the project for its thoughtful approach and the sensitivity with which it engages complex histories and shared imaginaries. Particular emphasis was placed on its collective authorship and the strength of its co-creative methodology, which underpin both its ethical framework and artistic vision.