This Letter presents a search for new light resonances decaying to pairs of quarks and produced in association with a high- pT photon or jet. The dataset consists of proton–proton collisions with an integrated luminosity of 36.1 fb −1 at a centre-of-mass energy of s=13 TeV recorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Resonance candidates are identified as massive large-radius jets with substructure consistent with a particle decaying into a quark pair. The mass spectrum of the candidates is examined for local excesses above background. No evidence of a new resonance is observed in the data, which are used to exclude the production of a lepto-phobic axial-vector Z′ boson.