Richard Maguire

Through the lens of (homo)sexuality, There Is No Beginning, As There Is No End highlights how ideas about sexual practice have been used as tools of oppression.  Maguire references spectacles of sexual “degeneracy” in the Indian Subcontinent, which were instrumentalised by colonial powers to justify brutality.  

Barbed wire and link fencing feature throughout Maguire’s highly skilled drawings –  these motifs deriving from the control, surveillance, and policing of minority groups and itinerant communities in the wake of British colonialism in India. Working also from archival photographs, Islamic painted miniatures, and Hindu statues, Maguire’s drawings acknowledge the ways that material and cultural production illustrate the workings of colonial oppression.  

The exhibition’s sculptural works reference the few surviving representations of same sex acts from Hindu temple statuary, many of which were destroyed in efforts to obscure the acceptance of sexuality across religions. Maguire also references the photographic oeuvre of photographer Lionel Wendt, one of the few Sri Lankan artists of his time to produce art featuring homoerotic imagery.