Marcia Farquhar

Farquhar works across a diversity of forms, including site-specific performance, object-making, painting and photography. Her performance work in the 1970s was radical in its very nature, ephemeral – intervening outside institutions of power, challenging exclusion, via a punk and alternative approach. She performed “wherever in the underground, on the Circle Line for example, round and round with indoor fireworks. In parks, on bandstands, in squats, at the side of other people’s stages”. She also had an alter ego called Max Dauber – invention and reinvention through renaming was part of the era. “He was a male painter who could do anything despite his unprepossessing name”.  Farquhar curated shows under this guise, as well as other fictitious characters. [All quotes: Marcia Farquhar, 2016]. As with so many artists working in that time, there was little separation between political actions and art actions, and therefore there is little to access in terms of evidential material.
Since 2015 she has been developing Vox Box, a jukebox which houses a collection of 7” vinyl records of recent audio interviews, conducted by Farquhar, with friends and colleagues recalling the work of 70s artists, activists and performers. Many of those included were associated with the Acme Gallery.