Quarks and gluons are the fundamental building blocks of visible matter, yet we cannot observe them because they are confined inside hadrons. In light of ongoing experimental advances at Jefferson Lab and other facilities, the theoretical description of hadrons within QCD still poses an enormous challenge: what is the nature of baryon resonances? Do tetraquarks and pentaquarks exist and if yes, how should we interpret them? Can we describe nucleon form factors, polarizabilities, or electroproduction amplitudes from the level of quarks and gluons? And is it possible to understand nuclei from the fundamental interactions in QCD?
Here I will discuss the approach employing Dyson-Schwinger, Bethe-Salpeter and Faddeev equations, whose basic promise is to calculate hadron properties from the nonperturbative structure of the underlying Green functions in QCD – the quark and gluon propagators, quark-gluon vertex etc. I will highlight some recent progress that has been made regarding the spectrum of mesons and baryons, tetraquarks, nucleon and nucleon resonance form factors, Compton scattering, and the muon g-2 problem, and I will discuss future perspectives and opportunities within this framework.