With All of those records; tell me, bee – the second chapter of the project Becoming B, curated by Marie-Sophie Dorsch – Krys Huba turns the gaze inward. Taking the poetic figure bee as a departure, they explore questions of queer identity and belonging within normative social patterns. bee itself materializes in the exhibition in traces, which unfold through paintings, poetic writing fragments, and sculptural objects. Across image and text, the works are interwoven by lines of connection that resist fixed forms and instead emerge into ever-shifting constellations.
During a residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Krys Huba engaged with the institution’s immediate public surroundings—a dense coexistence of urban subjects, intertwined through overlapping stories, sounds, and movements. Yet not all voices in this mesh are perceived equally. The artist draws this fragile fabric of the city into the exhibition space. This gesture turns the building’s wide glass front into a membrane—interweaving the city’s presence with the inner realm of the installation. They open the institution to various forms of expression and representation, while also creating intimate spaces through the placement of the works.
Suspended sheets of transparent fabric, treated with ink and silk dyes, soften the rigid contours of the architectural interior. Through the ephemeral materiality of the fabric, the boundaries of the space begin to blur, transforming it into a fluid, mutable construct that challenges fixed categories and deconstructs normative spatial orders. Within this shifting structure, Krys Huba embeds new paintings in which bodies appear in fragmented figures. Torsos emerge as isolated parts, avoiding the representation of any specific person or fixed identity. Muscles, shapes, and scars are rendered with painterly nuance – at times stark, at others tender – flowing gently across the canvas.
The exhibition continues Krys Huba’s artistic engagement with discarded Ikea Billy shelves, a process they began in a solo presentation at Mouches Volantes in Cologne. They disassemble the standardized formats into fragments, engraving texts and sketches into the plywood surfaces before casting these incisions in latex. Assembled into paravent-like configurations, the objects and their negative impressions in soft, translucent orange and yellow latex disrupt the strict rationality of the original shelving system. The result is a porous, permeable architecture through which visitors can not only pass but also enter – into the in-between, into what remains fleeting and ellusive. Krys Huba often places small found items and keepsakes within these shelf structures, weaving a layered mesh of object, memory, and narration.
This entanglement recurs further in Krys Huba’s poetic writings, which oscillate between archival fragments and poetic fabrications. Often emerging in parallel with the visual works, they open up additional layers of meaning. During the exhibition’s development at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, collective reading and editing of poetic and theoretical texts became a core part of the process. Fragments of text were shared between artist and curator, turning language into yet another material – one that creates resonance, gives voice to absences, and draws connections between image, body, and narrative. Throughout the exhibition’s duration, Krys Huba collaborates with performers, artists, and musicians to create performative moments that activate both the texts and the visual works.
All of those records; tell me, bee unfolds as a fragmentary interplay of ambivalences and traces of both subjective and collective experience. In this sense, Krys Huba reflects on space – on its potential to open up beyond institutional structures, bodily norms, and temporal boundaries.
