Ventriloquist Convention, Las Vegas 2000 © Asta Gröting
From 29th January to 9th March, 2003, the Freud Museum, in association with the Goethe Institut Inter Nationes, hosted the installation by sculptor, photographer and film-maker, Asta Gröting. Gröting is fascinated with the art of ventriloquism. The Inner Voice was an exhibition composed of still photographs and an on-going series of videos.
Each video featured a conversation with various ventriloquists, but always the same doll, using the ventriloquist’s art as a metaphor for the internal dialogues going on in all our heads.
Although the artist showed little direct interest in Freud’s work, there were resonant themes which may have contextualised the installation for Freud museum visitors: his concept of projection as a way we place elements of our inner world into other people; his discussion of animatronic dolls in ‘The Uncanny’ and the way in which the ‘living doll’ can become the stuff of nightmares; the asymmetrical relationship between parent and child in which children may become the unthinking mouthpieces of their parents.