Hind is a multidisciplinary art project that begins from camels as a deeply rooted part of Arab cultural memory, a presence historically tied to value, status and movement.
Marya Mayan re-presents the camel within a contemporary visual language built on colour, light, transparency and motion.
The works are distributed across painting, projection and sculptural elements, so that the camel appears differently in each medium while the cultural reference the work departs from remains present.
The project takes its title from an old linguistic association of the name Hind with one hundred camels.
The name carries a trace of a time when camels were a measure of wealth and standing, which makes language itself part of the memory of value. The project revisits this association from the present, and looks at what remains of the meaning after the conditions that produced it have changed.
From this comes the idea of camels as jewels of the desert, the image that shapes the visual language of the project.
The works borrow from jewels their density of colour, transparency and shine, and move away from the colours and visual conventions usually associated with the image of the desert.
In the paintings, camels appear through saturated colour fields and compositions that bring them closer to repeated visual units within the scene. In the sculptural works, colour turns into transparent bodies whose presence interacts with light and place.
The paintings are the starting point of the project. In them the image of the camel is reworked with strong, unnatural colour, shifting from a descriptive scene into a composition built on colour, rhythm and repetition.
Hind extends into architectural space through a digital work in pixel-art style, in which a caravan of camels moves around building facades.
The projection carries the caravan from a still image into movement, and uses architecture as the surface of the work, so the shape of the experience changes with the building, the scale and the path of the display.
The project includes the development of a series of transparent sculptures drawn from the form of the camel, working as an extension of the same colour language into material.
The material lets light pass through colour, so the appearance of the work changes with the lighting, the viewing angle and the surrounding place.
These elements are currently presented as development renders within the sculptural stage of the project.
