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, LIFENESSLESS, explores the way in which voices resonate in the space between worlds of the dead and the living, what Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut have called the 'intermundane'.

"In late capitalism, the dead are highly productive. Of course, all capital is dead labor, but the dead also generate capital in collaboration with the living. What is “late” about late capitalism could be the new arrangements of interpenetration between worlds of living and dead, arrangements that might best be termed intermundane"
'Deadness. Technologies of the Intermundane'. Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut

Artist duo Sonia Leber and David Chesworth will present a new audio performance, 'Unseen Light : Prologue (Split open the atom in ourselves)', featuring sound collected from over 90 hours of séance tapes, purchased from a deceased estate, recorded by a New Zealand family in Auckland, and later Australia, between 1958 and 1972.

Diego Ramirez will perform a musical ‘audition’ for a Mexican vampire part in the upcoming Buffy The Vampire Slayer reboot, which has been remediated to incorporate greater 'diversity'.

Tim Dwyer will present an audio cut-up piece for the end of civilisation made from samples of debates, murmurs, proclamations, cries and shrieks in the voice of a black hole.

"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'..