The term “Ruffneck Constructivists” is Walker’s intentional recasting of “Russian Constructivists.” Viewing F.T. Marinetti’s 1909 Futurist Manifesto as a precursor to hip hop artist The Notorious B.I.G.’s Machine Gun Funk, the phrase “Ruffneck Constructivists” evokes thuggishness as an expression of abjection. Walker’s wordplay suggests a relationship between the works on view in the exhibition and the moment, a century ago, when art and architecture were remaking a modern world. The exhibition features sculpture, photography, and video and focuses on structure and space as it is made and remade by policed bodies and identities. As Walker states, “it is my hope that the interaction between these very divergent works and methods could return a viewer to the questions of modernism, architecture, urbanism and the resistant bodies who reshape it.”
—Contemporary &
