7:30 pm & 9 pm on October 24
As part of the 2026 Festival d’Automne, the Bourse de Commerce presents Community Sigh, a performance by multidisciplinary American artist Christine Sun Kim, whose work explores the relationships between sound and language. Here, she takes the sigh as a key expression of our time.
Originally, Community Sigh took the form of a sound installation composed of vinyl records bringing together the sighs of more than sixty Deaf people in an asynchronous chorus marked by exhaustion. Christine Sun Kim now reimagines the work as a performance, in which the sigh becomes both a sonic expression and a visual gesture. She turns it into a symbol of political fatigue – particularly that experienced by marginalized groups fighting for visibility and rights –while also creating a space for pause, renewal, and collective gathering.
Community Sigh is presented in the museum’s Rotunda alongside Barbara Kruger’s immersive installation The History of Tears. The visual and sonic intensity of Barbara Kruger’s work is met by the slowness, silence, and exhaustion of Christine Sun Kim’s performance. Through contrasting means, the two artists examine power relations, social and political inequalities, and the capacity of language to make these issues tangible.
Christine Sun Kim’s multidisciplinary practice explores how sound and language operate within society. Working across written text, visual notation systems, American Sign Language (ASL), and video, she challenges social hierarchies surrounding sound and speech.
