At Auber, Christine Sun Kim sends sound traveling as images
· BehindLines newsroom
In Paris, Deaf artist Christine Sun Kim is showing eight works in the Auber RER station as part of the Festival d'Automne. The series, titled L'esprit de l'escalier, remains on view until 21 December. The part installed on the roof of Galeries Lafayette Haussmann, by contrast, ended on 31 October.
Signs that occupy space
According to the Festival, L'esprit de l'escalier blends humour with the principles of graphic musical notation. It is a new large-scale series created for the event, the artist's first appearance there. The project belongs to a broader effort to document, preserve and pass on Deaf culture and history.
On the roof, Forever Behind Now explored how American Sign Language expresses time: the past behind the body, the present in the signer's immediate space, the future in front. The Festival says the movement, speed and impact of the gesture are essential here, and that the charcoal drawings play with this timeline.
This research extends All Day All Night, shown at the Whitney Museum in New York in 2025. The museum brought together drawings, videos, sculptures and installations, and showed how the artist turns the spatial dynamism of sign language into graphic form. It presents this as a way of challenging the assumption that spoken languages are better than signed ones.
Practical details: venues and access
The exhibition is free. At Auber, visitors enter through the station with a transport ticket, and the station is open daily from 5:45 a.m. to 1:20 a.m., according to the Festival. The Galeries Lafayette site separately says she is present in the corridors of the Auber and Opéra stations until December 2026, in collaboration with the RATP. A RATP page reportedly mentioning an end in January 2027 could not be consulted; the date used here is the Festival's.