A mermaid juggles a ball. A man riding a dinosaur waits for instructions under the strict gaze of the tamer. Franz Liszt gets lost in Bavarian forestry, while in a Czech sports club, the rules of the Hanky Code are read out between serve and receive. Hay bales roll across fields, high heels sink into the forest floor, and provincial towns are smashed to pieces.

Between motorway and queerness, football and model railways, false eyelashes and village pubs, CIRCUS moves on. It pitches its tent where none is intended, making the familiar appear strange for a moment and the strange appear strangely familiar. Landscapes become backdrops, memories become props, and biographies become roles that are put on, exaggerated, and taken off again.

Since 2023, Lion Bischof, Felix Burger, and Otakar Skala have been developing CIRCUS as an ongoing performative film project on journeys through Upper Bavaria and the Czech Republic. Places shaped by biography transform into temporary stages where different social milieus, conceptions of masculinity, sexuality, origin, and belonging meet.

In their performances, Burger and Skala often function as antipodes. Coming from different social milieus, living queer or straight, having grown up in rural or urban settings, they switch roles, act as doppelgängers, and challenge each other. In addition to staged sequences, conversations among the protagonists form a central point of the project. The ensemble discusses their own role assignments in artistic systems, biographical privileges and hurdles, or performs a reality check with former life ideals.

Bischof’s camera accompanies and choreographs this process and becomes part of the shared journey itself.

CIRCUS questions gender stereotypes and, with much empathy and humor, explores the possibilities for an exchange of experiences between very different men. The project has no fixed timeframe but is considered ongoing by the three artists. Thus, CIRCUS continues to grow between documentation and staging, biography and fiction, with every journey – without a fixed location or final form.

The form of presentation within an institutional framework is equally undetermined. The Kunstpalais realizes CIRCUS as an immersive exhibition with an extensive accompanying program.

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Image: Lion Bischof, Felix Burger, and Otakar Skala, CIRCUS, 2023