A Hypocritical Reader

Exit Ambition is a catalogue of practices, documents, videos, and other projects - virtual & actual. The book operates as an incomplete index of a series of installations, instructions, anti-plays, performance scores, descriptions, etc.

Jake Reber lives and works in Buffalo, NY, where he co-curates hystericallyreal.com.

A “witty, often-chilling, compulsively readable” (Vogue) horror debut following a woman who seeks refuge at an all-trans girl commune only to discover that demons haunt her fellow comrades—and she’s their next prey!

Herculine’s narrator has demons. Sure, her life includes several hallmarks of the typical trans girl sob story—conversion therapy, a string of shitty low-paying jobs, and even shittier exes—but she also regularly debates sleep paralysis demons that turn to mist soon after she wakes and carries vials of holy oil in her purse. Nothing, though, prepares her for the new malevolent force stalking her through the streets of New York City, more powerful than any she’s ever encountered. Desperate to escape this ancient evil, she flees to rural Indiana, where her ex-girlfriend started an all-trans girl commune in the middle of the woods.

The secluded camp, named after 19th-century intersex memoirist Herculine Barbin, is a scrappy operation, but the shared sense of community among the girls is a welcome balm to the narrator’s growing isolation and paranoia. Still, something isn’t quite right at Herculine. Girls stop talking as soon as she enters the room, everyone seems to share a common secret, and the books lining the walls of the library harbor strange cryptograms. Soon what once looked like an escape becomes a trap all its own. 

While trying to untangle the commune’s many mysteries, the narrator contends with disemboweled pigs, cultlike psychosexual rituals, and the horrors of communal breakfast. And before long, she discovers that her demons have followed her. And this time, they won’t be letting her go.

First comprehensive monograph of the Swedish queer and feminist performance artist.

Holes Dug, Rocks Thrown is the first comprehensive presentation of Line Skywalker Karlström's work. It documents a practice, that over a period of more than twenty years have been committed to "queer feminist world making" using a performative and embodied approach. Correspondingly with Skywalker Karlström's understanding of art as a chaotic and associative knowledge production, which unfolds as a collaborative and ongoing conversation, their book has become a bastard monograph, which describes an artistic practice through its relationships and its flock. For the book, Skywalker Karlström has invited a number of colleagues to engage in conversations with them departing from selected works and jointly attempt to expand upon the strengths and qualities of queer and feminist artistic strategies. In addition to an extensive documentation of works, drawings and ephemera, Holes Dug, Rocks Thrown contains a number of inserts with works by other artists, which have informed Skywalker Karlström's art practice.

Line Skywalker Karlström (born 1971 in Karlstad, Sweden, lives and works in Berlin) is a Swedish performance artist who works with a diverse range of materials dealing with the role of art in life, lesbian and gay identity and the perception of space. Her performances take place in the public realm and also in gallery installations. Karlström was a member of the feminist performance group High Heels Sisters (2002-2007), and a founding member of YES! Association / Föreningen JA! (2005-2018), a group of Swedish artist activists that she left in 2009.

Do you feel it? I'm holding your hand. Come with me. Look! There's a mirror, many mirrors! They are watching us, but we don't have to care. This night belongs to us. This infinity. Come! ... World! Just watch us...as we prowl the arcades of fallen memory...

On work and words, and how they contort the world.

Lena is a part-time bookseller in a bougie design studio in Oxford Circus. In between minimum-wage work under a politically hostile boss and strained communications with her parents, her days are shaped by a fraught relationship with food, ambiguous experiments in creative writing, and mounting pressure to find a ‘proper’ postgraduate job.

In taut, pocket-sized vignettes, COOP reveals a suffocating lattice of language that makes up a precarious London life. But as each word of her story unravels, Lena discovers interstices between them—to find autonomy and escape.

Drawn from Lou Sullivan’s meticulously kept journals, this landmark book records the life of arguably the first publicly gay trans man to medically transition.

We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan narrates the inner life of a gay trans man moving through the shifting social, political, and medical mores of the second half of the 20th century. Sullivan kept comprehensive journals from age eleven until his AIDS-related death at thirty-nine. Sensual, lascivious, challenging, quotidian and poetic, the diaries complicate and disrupt normative trans narratives. Entries from twenty-four diaries reveal Sullivan’s self-articulation and the complexity of a fascinating and courageous figure.

Edited by: Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma
Introduction by: Susan Stryker