UDDEVALLA.- Playing the Legend is a conceptual multimedia installation that examines the production of material culture and myth within the family and metallurgical lineages of the world-renowned Zildjian cymbal. The project emerges from a long-term collaboration between visual artist Mike Bode and ethnomusicologist, violinist, and cultural mediator Audrey Wozniak.

The exhibition takes a musical instrument as its primary interlocutor: specifically, the 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 production in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and the United States.

Playing the Legend evokes resonances through juxtaposition, fragmentation, and non-linear constellation as a stylistic and ethical choice. 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. 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.

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

Curated by Jonatan Habib Engqvist.