Sydney Contemporary 2026
Ames Yavuz
Booth C03, Sydney Contemporary
Carriageworks, Sydney
September 3 -6, 2026
Artist statement
Cats in France have unique legal and social agency. Under French law, they are recognized as "living beings gifted with sentience" rather than mere objects. The law grants them defined protections, strict rights to humane treatment, and legal standing in society. It means in France you can’t really own a cat; you can only host one, and if it decides to go and live with somebody else; c’est la vie.
I have been thinking about what it means to possess an object or thing, especially when that thing has agency or exists outside of our time. Mike Skinner has a lyric that says I came to this world with nothing, and I’ll leave with nothing but love – everything else is just borrowed. To me this is especially relevant with objects that have existed before us and will exist far longer than we will. Rather than ‘owners’ we are surely custodians for a time before that thing is entrusted to the next person. In the case of cats (with legal agency) it is us humans that exist outside of their time and what are they if not custodians of us, who will then entrust us with the next cat in our lives after theirs?
This transfer of custodianship becomes complicated when there is contested provenance, or the acquisition of the object involves deceitful or violent actions. This is further complicated when the object or cat has found a home or museum plinth where it is treasured. At this point the treasured can be defined as treasure and is synonymous with booty, loot and spoils.
Museums around the world including Australia, but especially Europe and the United States have a history of housing/owning/possessing objects that were acquired through colonial military looting, temple theft and wartime seizure. Sometimes in the case of these stolen objects, the country of origin successfully contests proprietorship. Although often nothing is done about it, or the current custodians whether they be individuals or institutions, resist repatriation. I find the urge to hold onto these objects in the face of indisputable evidence of theft; fascinating. Is it a fear of reputational damage, the loss of monetary investment or does it become, or be revealed to be, an insatiable appetite to simply possess a thing? Does the preciousness of a thing overrule authorship, or does repatriation undermine their authority over knowledge? And at what point does ancestral ownership/authorship supersede current custodianship? I don’t know.
In my series Possession I have created a series of diptychs featuring a cropped in images of objects in Museum collections with contested ownership or questionable provenance, paired with images of obviously domesticated cats. In these paintings often the cat is being held by anonymised hands, suggesting an owner/owned relationship. In each pair there is compositional mirroring or association, creating a relationship that I hope the audience interrogates as both metaphor and simile. What belongs to who in each scenario?