Dream 04: Lust Beyond the Patriarchy

Ulli Lust Retrospective | November 8, 2025 – January 17, 2026

When I filmed a portrait feature with Ulli Lust in 2013, she had just published her international comic bestseller “Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life” — a laconic, autobiographical coming-of-age story. In it, she recounts a journey through Italy she undertook as a 17-year-old punk in the 1980s together with a friend. “We were looking for adventure,” Lust recalls. “Unfortunately, we were also presented with the bill — in the form of rape.”

At the time, she was working on “How I Tried to Be a Good Person” (2017), a deeply reflective graphic novel about a love triangle shaped by sexual obsession, gender conflict, and intercultural tension. “I started drawing erotic motifs when I was twenty-two, and I was terribly ashamed,” Lust says. “I threw the drawings in the trash and then burned them — just so no one would ever see them. Back then, I could never have imagined that one day I’d lay all my dirt out in public.” The book went on to become another major success and is now considered a landmark feminist graphic novel.

With “Woman as Human” (2025), Ulli Lust presents a meticulously researched work of non-fiction comics in which she re-examines early human history and dismantles long-standing patriarchal myths. Drawing on archaeological and anthropological research, she demonstrates that many early societies were far more egalitarian than later historical narratives suggest. The book combines scholarly depth with a powerful visual language that places female figures and symbols at its center. As the first graphic novel ever to receive the German Non-Fiction Book Prize (Deutscher Sachbuchpreis), the work not only reshapes our understanding of the past but also articulates a compelling vision of a post-patriarchal future.

The exhibition “Lust Beyond the Patriarchy” runs at Lovelab Dreamspace until January 17, 2026, featuring signed prints, original works, and unique pieces from Ulli Lust’s oeuvre. The neighboring bookshop Montag offers signed copies of her books.

Tim Ra