Liquid Architecture Co-Artistic Director Joel Stern has been invited by Gertrude Contemporary to curate the 2019 edition of Octopus, an annual exhibition program, initiated in 2001, showcasing experimental and ambitious curatorial research and practice. The resultant project VENTRILOQUY features new works and performances by Australian and international artists through an exhibition at Gertrude accompanied by public programs presented in partnership with Liquid Architecture at various venues around Melbourne.

This performance program, ANACHRONISM EFFECTS, explores the way ventriloquy performs a dislocation of body from voice in time and in space. The program borrows its title from scholar Sarah Kessler's research into 'ventriloquial materiality' and ventriloquism's "enduring anachronism—its at once anticipatory and antiquated appearance." ANACHRONISM EFFECTS features new performances created for Ventriloquy by Ash Kilmartin; Mel Deerson and Briony Galligan; Melody Paloma; MP Hopkins.

Ash Kilmartin will perform 'You, as a paragraph', a monologue for mediated voice, engaging the ventriloquial tropes of possession, dislocation, and the excessive physicality of (the at times seemingly autonomous and absurd) speaking voice.

Melody Paloma will de- and re-code a suite of Code Poems by Hannah Weiner, master ventriloquist and psychic host to corporeal and non-corporeal bodies alike, in collaboration with retired seafarers Neil Butt and Leigh Webster.

Mel Deerson and Briony Galligan will traverse the theater curtain separating heaven from hell.

MP Hopkins will read through himself some texts about speaking/voice/language and hear himself doing this reading to himself.

"The variability of the voice’s origin, whether magically detached from the body, or erupting from illegitimate orifices, means that the ventriloquial voice is both an attempt to imagine and pit the speech of the body against the speech of culture, and an attempt to control that illegitimate speech, to draw it into discourse."
Steven Connor

What we call ventriloquism is an effect, created in the mind of the spectator. (As Steven Connor says, ‘The art of ventriloquism consists very largely in persuading the audience to do much of the ventriloquist’s work [....] in enfleshing the voice from the skeletal approximations that the ventriloquist supplies”.) Ventriloquy is as much a trick of the mind as it is a trick of the mouth. The sound is issuing from either the wrong time and place, or the wrong voice and body. Or from no body at all. The voice and its shadow, time out of place, a wrong time-place: ventriloquism is about being in-and-out of sync. It is an anachronism, or as Connor (again) says, a dissociation effect, the voice separated from its source, the source either known but not present (‘clear, so to speak, to the ear, but not apparent to the eye’); or purely imagined (hearing voices where there are none). But the difference between these two, ‘the difference between dissimulation and hallucination’, may not always be objective. Speech itself may live as a state of ventriloquy, in ‘there’ talking within us as if we are spoken from elsewhere. Do we, like the doll, offer ourselves as a dummy location for the voice which cannot be placed - a vessel for dummification?

From 'Narcissism and its Echoes: Notes from Steven Connor’s Knee'.