LONDON.- The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) London presents a new commission and recent work by New York-based artist Autumn Knight, marking the first major presentation of her work in the UK.
Knight’s interdisciplinary practice draws on theatre, psychology, improvisation and social exchange. Titled I Can’t Complain, her solo exhibition at the ICA presents a new installation and performance work about the act of complaining: its pleasures, its frustrations, and its political potential. At a moment when questions of voice, authority, and participation are increasingly contested, I Can’t Complain opens a dialogue with audiences about how power is negotiated in everyday life, asking not how we can stop complaining, but what complaints make visible.
Across an audio and spatial installation and a selection of recent video works, Autumn Knight transforms the Lower Galleries into a space where complaint is given sustained attention. The main gallery is dominated by a canopy of balloons, which are a recurring motif in Knight’s work, alongside architectural elements that frame the artist’s sound installation. For the latter, Knight recorded conversations with participants about their everyday irritations and grievances, revealing how seemingly minor dissatisfactions can expose larger social and systemic failings.
Trivial gripes about food quality or an uncomfortable social exchange, for example, connect to cultural and class-based inequities. Characteristic of Knight’s practice, these works embrace humour, discomfort, and intimacy – inviting visitors to consider how complaints are judged and what they reveal about systems of authority.
I Can’t Complain offers a disruption of the taboo surrounding the act of complaining. Knight takes an active interest in people’s relationship to expressing discontent, acknowledging the relief in voicing disappointment and the satisfaction of naming an irritation. Considering complaint in this way also prompts the questions: who has the right to complain? What value judgements are taking place when we classify something as complaint? Where can you speak up, where is it welcomed or dismissed? In this way, rather than discredit complaint as an unimportant nuisance, Knight positions it as information which can then be understood as a tool to unearth injustice.
Knight studied drama therapy and theatre arts before pursuing performance practices within a contemporary art context. Working across performance, installation, video and text, she examines authority and group dynamics by creating situations that expose structures of power and participation in everyday encounters. The artist is both observer and instigator. Her work often begins with a prompt or proposal that allows space for conflict and exchange. The video works in the back gallery present earlier iterations of her investigations into complaint that involved objects, collaboration with participants, and the prompt to share their annoyances.
For I Can’t Complain, Knight extends this logic into new performance work that will punctuate the gallery space on dates throughout the exhibition’s run, and include multiple solo performances by Knight (1, 12 and 15 October), as well as performances developed in collaboration with London-based artist Samra Mayanja (mid-November) and the Brussels-based artistic duo Michelangelo Miccolis and nick von kleist (late-November).
Andrea Nitsche-Krupp, Exhibitions Curator, says: “Autumn Knight has a remarkability ability to approach uncomfortable questions with humour and sincerity. She scrutinises seemingly trivial complaints (we all have them) not because they are exceptional, but for their ability to reveal values and power structures we are otherwise in the habit of overlooking. Her exhibitions and performances then function as a form of collective inquiry. The result is work that feels immediate, provocative, and deeply humane.”
Bengi nsal, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts says: “Autumn’s practice speaks directly to what the ICA can uniquely support: work that moves between exhibition, performance, sound and social exchange, and that asks audiences to become active participants in how meaning is produced. I Can’t Complain could only take shape in an institution willing to hold humour, discomfort, intimacy and critique in the same space, and to treat the gallery not as a fixed container but as a live site of encounter. Having followed the evolution of Autumn’s remarkable practice, we are proud to support this important new commission and honoured that she has placed her trust in the ICA.”
Autumn Knight is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist who works with performance, installation, video, and text. Drawing from her training in theatre and the psychology of group dynamics, Knight makes performances that reshape perceptions of race, gender, and authority.
Knight’s performance works have been presented by major museums, galleries, and performance venues including Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2025); Shedhalle, Zrich (2025); Performance Space New York, New York (2023); Museum Ostwall, Dortmund, Germany (2023); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA Chicago), Chicago (2022); Western Front, Vancouver (2021); The Kitchen, New York (2020); Performa, New York (2019); the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019); Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Portland (2024, 2018); Akademie der Knste, Berlin (2018); and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2017), among many others.
Knight’s work WALL (2014–16) is the first live performance work to enter the permanent collection of The Studio Museum in Harlem.
Knight’s solo exhibitions include Nothing #26: The Potential of Nothing Is Everything at Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York, New York (2023); and In Rehearsal at Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois (2017).
Knight is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, honours, and fellowships, including the Artadia Award, Art Matters Grant, Rema Hort Mann Grant, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize in Visual Art, Guggenheim Fellowship, and most recently the Trellis Art Fund Grant. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2016) and holds a B.A. in Theater Arts from Dillard University and an M.A. in Drama Therapy from New York University.
