POST CIRCLE
Monika Požerskytė’s 2015 series Post Circle uses analogue and digital photography to document a disappearing circus tradition in Lithuania. The project focuses on one particular circus troupe and on people whose identities are conveyed not only through appearance, posture, and gesture, but also through the environments in which they live and the everyday work they perform.
The photographer is interested in the duality of the performers’ identities and the transition between embodying a circus role and taking on an everyday social role. She photographs people in intermediate states, when they are not fully identified with either role, asking whether photography can represent a single “true” identity. The project also considers the position of the nomad and the outsider in contemporary society and culture.
Within the series, the dynamics, expressive physicality, and emotional quality associated with circus meet the routines of everyday life. Požerskytė describes contemporary circus not simply as entertainment, but as a field of philosophical, aesthetic, and artistic ideas in which drama, history, folklore, exotic culture, and fundamental human concerns intersect.