Just frustration, proposes frustration as a ground for artistic production. Frustration that at the same time as a feeling, takes aim at the entrenched ideologies, local specificities, and claims for global progress that bind the everyday. The artists in this exhibition call attention to particularly European–historical paradigms, alongside recent social and economic collapses, and the conservative crusade of ‘common sense’: where futures seem to be permanently seen from the perspective of a past of outwardly and inwardly expressed fear and appear only to withhold and repeat the dogmatic values with which the old Man of Europe has shaped its relation to the world.

If the artists in Just frustration invoke these already frustrated conditions and the inevitable relation to the world from which they arise, it is in emphasising the ways old hegemonies are still prevalent everyday: not simply as a cynical reaction, or irony of ‘critique's’ claims for distance, but in drawing toward the shared and divisive arenas of objects, movement, and affect that have tangled together this seemingly permanent present. Just frustration then, draws on the work of artists whose work asks how these conditions might be nuanced or distorted, made apparent (again), or held in common otherwise: Exploring various narratives, performance, and material–metaphors of the contemporary, the artists offer a fleeting, but cohering point of contact where the specific situated and global concerns meet to challenge our ability to overcome this past and present.