An audio installation fills the main gallery of the ICA. The voices comprise the testimonies of five participants, tasked by Autumn Knight to simply complain. The empirical corpus is overlayed and spliced with tangled threads of audio, unmistakably mined from TikTok. Their perspectives differ: one woman narrates that ‘these simple red beans don’t taste the same’ while another recounts her experience being assaulted on the Northern Line. The voices are knotted with brain-rot jingles and bursts of reggaeton, yet the muddle of chatter parallels the familiar thrum of a teeming bus or over-crowded GP surgery. These are sites of community where we begin to recognise ourselves in one another’s irritations. Yet, within this dense sonic landscape, the articulation of each participant’s respective woes is dampened to jarring grumble. Autumn Knight poses the question of who gets to complain, and who gets drowned out amid the babble.

I Can’t Complain is, counterintuitively, an exercise in indulging in complaining. In her first solo UK exhibition, New York-based artist Autumn Knight metabolises a background in psychology and theatre to present a show that incorporates sound, installation, video and performance. Commissioned by the ICA, the exhibition run includes a series of five live performances staged between Thursday 1 October and Friday 20 November, including London-based artist Samra Mayanja, and Brussels-based collaborators Michelangelo Miccolis and nick von kleist. I Can’t Complain examines how the quotidian act of whinging discloses negotiations of power in everyday life and unwittingly wields a sharp counterinstitutional potential.

In the first gallery, Knight’s audio installation is anchored by a canopy of black balloons suspended from the ceiling by a large cargo net. Six ropes attached to pulleys bear the structure’s weight, allowing it to be lowered during Knight’s performances. A slim rectangular lightbox lies centrally beneath the net, cloaking the suspended balloons in a shiny lacquer. They are each of varying tensity – some are bulbous and swollen, others withered and crumpled. The balloons’ buoyancy is counterbalanced as the net bulges underneath the load of their apparent mass.

The balloons are destined to rupture. We listen to the splintered complaints of Knight’s participants that never quite cohere into release, and the combination breeds a heady sense of inertia. We are swallowed by entropic babble. Likewise, the balloons expel air at a rate that far supersedes the average human attention span – albeit the time a ticket permits us in the gallery. We want them all to burst. Sheepish viewers sit on wooden benches pressed to the gallery’s edges that face each other. The discomfort in the room is palpable but no one buckles to acknowledge this. Knight asks us to listen closer to complaints usually buried in the modern din, yet she dwells on the density that smothers them to the extent that our own irritation may hinder the attention she asks of us.

Complaining has long acted as a mechanism for feminists to interrogate institutional authority. The Guerilla Girls’ Complaints Department (2016) at Tate Modern invited members of the public to write grievances on brightly coloured paper to fill boards around the gallery space. Serving as a call to conversation, the initiative became a shrine to the act of gripe. While the former aimed to confront unjust conditions within the Tate’s hallowed halls, Knight’s exhibition does not have a streamlined target. Instead, Knight reckons with what it means to complain as a person of colour and the additional burden of labour this requires.

Complain/Disappointment (2023) and Untitled (Complain) (2023) are screened in the adjoining back gallery of the ICA. Intercut every ten minutes, the video compilation is approximately two hours and documents University students and educators from SUNY Purchase College interacting with sculptural objects arranged by Knight. Here, performers recite extracts of text from people who ‘are not usually allowed to complain’. Some attempt to burst already broken bubble wrap while a circus of students fail to salvage broken glass. Interspersed throughout are cuts of Knight stroking and eating a plastic bronze beetle, a collage of shiny beads, and a student sucking the dregs of a balloon. For people of colour within an educational institution, simply complaining is presented here as shattering work. While affecting, this earlier work of Knights perhaps lacks the bite of her newer installation, and it is only the absurdist shots that prevent the film from trespassing into the realm of the didactic.

I Can’t Complain chips away at the taboo of making a fuss. It asks what complaint can amplify, and who has been silenced by its absence. Complaint is collective work. Knight insists that amid the racket, we take the time to listen.

Autumn Knight: I Can’t Complain is on show at ICA until 29th November 2026. To find out more, visit their website.

Images: Autumn Knight, I Can’t Complain, 2026. Installation view at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2026. Photograph: Luke Walker. / Autumn Knight, I Can’t Complain [detail], 2026. Installation view at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2026. Photograph: Luke Walker.