LIBIDINOUS ECONOMY

For those descended from nations that have histories of cultural collision and syncretism, or which have experienced violent imperialism, desire is a fraught emotion with historical and contemporary baggage. Through his reading of the work of Indrani Chatterjee, Maguire understands that ‘entire system[s] of subordination,’ have relied upon the control and abuse of sexuality. Seeking to unpack this, Maguire made a series of drawings titled Libidinous Economies, some of which are on view in What Happens to Remain Unsaid.

In this series are stories of figures who have navigated these systems, people who have rebelled against them and reclaimed their autonomy. Photographer Lionel Wendt and the writer Aubrey Menen are two such figures. Their respective images and texts are a record of their dissent - and that of their peers and lovers - against the homophobic and racist apparatus of the British Empire. It is in this spirit of dissent that Maguire approaches images, grasping at ‘legacies of bodies unseen or erased,’ to assemble ‘possibilities of how they performed and resisted optics of sexuality, employed their bodies as tools of anti-colonialism and evaded surveillance or cohabited such stances and lived otherwise’.

The subject of A daughter, a mistress and master is Merle Oberon. Born in Bombay and raised by her grandmother, Oberon kept her true parentage a secret throughout her life.
Her birth mother was a victim of such economy, raped during her teenage years by an Anglo-Irish foreman of a tea plantation. In school, she was taunted for her mixed ethnicity. She later became an actress and passed as White. When Oberon was cast as Cathy in the 1939 adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, she transcended her racial ambiguity to portray a symbol of British upper-class feminine purity. This transformation is even more subversive when viewed alongside Cathy’s love interest and foil, Heathcliff, a ‘wild’ man whose ambiguous race threatens Cathy’s position in the class hierarchy.

LIBIDINOUS ECONOMY (PARTIALLY FORMING WHAT HAPPENED TO REMAIN UNSAID)

TEXT BY CHLOE AUSTIN, COURTESY OF MAXIMILLIAN WILLIAM, LONDON

images provided courtesy of Maximillian William, London. Photographs by Deniz Guzel.