Playing the Legend centers a musical instrument as its primary interlocutor: a cymbal whose alloy was reputedly developed by Ottoman-Armenian alchemist Avedis Zildjian for the Ottoman sultan in 1623, and whose secret formula, according to legend, has been passed down generation to generation, all the way to the fourteenth generation of Zildjians now running a cymbal factory – named “America’s oldest family business” – in Massachusetts.

The cymbal’s transnational circulations—from Ottoman courts and military bands to European orchestras and American jazz—are inseparable from the mobility of the Armenian Zildjian family and shifting regimes of subjecthood, kinship, and belonging in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and the United States.

The exhibition emerges from a long-term collaboration between visual artist Mike Bode and ethnomusicologist, violinist, and cultural mediator Audrey Wozniak. It evokes resonances through juxtaposition, fragmentation, and non-linear constellation as a stylistic and ethical choice. Product catalogues and specifications, slogans, advertising claims, newspaper articles, historical documents, films, musical and textual quotations resonate spatially, mounted on glass sheets or projected onto walls or shown on screens in ways that allow them to be passed through, partially read, or even missed. In what at first bears resemblance to a museological exhibition, the artists seek to undermine an easy resolution of the materials into a continuous history, which risks obfuscating asymmetries and contradictions embedded in production, circulation, valuation, and memory.

If the cymbal, as material and legend, both orientates and unsettles knowledge of the past and ourselves, can exhibition-making offer alternative sensibilities for such entanglements?

Rather than privileging narrative explanation, this exhibition foregrounds the instrument and the unlikely relations it animates. Across ritual, religious, military, orchestral, popular, and commercial contexts, the cymbal resounds as a struck surface, a vibrating body, and a legend. Centering the cymbal makes it possible to engage with questions of how notions of time and modernity are constructed, made sensible, capitalized upon, and create social relations and cultural conceptions. By foregrounding the cymbal as a material actor, the exhibition reframes modernity not as abstract ideology but as enacted through metallurgy, labor, branding, and sound.

The cymbal does not represent history–instead, as an instrument that gathers and resounds the meanings inscribed upon it, the cymbal serves a vital role in human constructions of self and belonging in relation to notions of past, present, and future.

Curated by Jonatan Habib Engqvist