Visitors entering the grand public piazza at the heart of London’s Somerset House will find their view to the other side blocked, and if they try to navigate from the Courtauld Gallery gateway towards the Thames terrace a barrier will block their direct passage. Zigzagging across the courtyard, surrounded by William Chambers’ late-18th century neoclassical façades, is a 2-metre-high linear sculpture formed of decorative hanging canvases. The colour of the work subtly shifts from a deep, blood red to the Aldwych entrance, fading into a paler hue towards the Thames-side.



What from a distance at first reads as a blockage, reveals details of pattern and print when examined up close. Each side of the sinuous sculpture has a different aesthetic, and stamp-like motifs recur across the many sheets as they gently sway in the wind. It’s the work of Hylozoic/Desires, formed of artists Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser, and while the sculpture is striking and present in the way it creates an 80 metres long boundary across the courtyard, it is in fact an invitation to the visitor to dive deeper into the rich, site-responsive research that led to its creation and is presented in a suite of spaces in the corner of Somerset House.

It is a project about the politics and history of salt in India, and it speaks directly to the history of Somerset House, but the research project started two years ago in the Coachella Desert. Hylozoic/Desires had been invited to take part in Desert X, a festival of sculpture the responds to and sits within different parts of the Californian landscape around Palm Springs. Inspired by the rich material and sensorial qualities of the Salton Sea, a 56km long, shallow locked lake with a high salt content. Their project for Desert X 2023, Namak Nazar, used salt as a metaphor reaching into modern mythologies including UFOlogy, flat-earthers, and chemtrails, designing a salt-clad totemic tower in the desert playing a layered sound-scape fusing music with spoken word folk, biblical, and political stories into a prose-poem around climate change and the desert before colonisation.



As part of the Desert X project, Hylozoic/Desires had been researching the Inland Customs Line, a 4000km long hedge constructed in the 1840s by the India Office, a British Government department, as a single piece of infrastructure to control movement of salt and enforce taxation. Salt was not only valuable to Britain as a preservative – especially for the navy – but was also a key financial resource, generating money through the Salt Office, the governmental department managing the commodity until the abolition of salt tax in 1825. Commonly known as the Great Salt Hedge, it was a major undertaking of British authoritarian control of the Indian people and landscape, estimated to be employing up to 14,000 people to secure and control the hedge, security lookouts, and gateways in 1869.

The Salt Office was located in a suite of corner rooms of Somerset House and so when the institution’s Director of Exhibitions, Dr Cliff Lauson, heard about Hylozoic/Desires’ research, he visited their London studio to have a chat about salt – a conversation ultimately leading, a year and a half later, to their installation filling the courtyard and Salt Office today. The original idea was to recreate the hedge, tracing a scaled-down copy of the path it tracked across 19th century India but as the artists discovered more history of the building’s relationship to salt and its taxation – both in its architecture and the discovery of processes, materials, and documents – the project grew in scope and became more poetic in aesthetic.




The shape of the courtyard sculpture, titled namak halal/namak haram, is still arranged to follow the form of the Inland Customs Line, but instead of a hedge, the barrier is recreated through hand-printed cotton fabric. The decorative red pattern also speaks to the project’s research: the colour is derived from vegetal dies fixed with salt, and the patterns are created from wooden stamps made by the artists to mimic those used by tax inspectors in the Salt Office. There is a twist – where the British Government’s stamp featured a lion, here the animal at the centre of the stamp is a termite, a tiny creature that nonetheless caused immense damage to Imperial materials and architecture, as well as a derogatory name given to Indian people by British rulers. Even the framework structure supporting the fabric is derived from design of a Wardian Case, an early travelling terrarium used to protect foreign plants over long sea journeys as they were imported to European nations from colonial outposts.

Inside the former Salt Office in Somerset house, some of this research and further creative exploration is presented in Salt Cosmologies, a neat exhibition offering critical context to the sculpture in the courtyard outside. Here, visitors can see a map showing the course of the Great Salt Hedge across India as well as an historic plan of Somerset House showing the arrangement of taxation offices. The botanical and natural history of the hedge is also explored, considering the infrastructure with the duality of being both imposing and fragile. Also on display are the wooden blocks Hylozoic/Desires used to create the fabric patterns.



The Salt Staircase has been newly opened-up to the public as an extension of the project, allowing visitors to recreate the path taken by countless Salt Tax workers of the past, from the ground floor offices to the basement rooms where the taxation stamping and paperwork was undertaken. Along the path, the artists present a soundscape re-using some of the auditory ingredients of their Desert X project that began the research project. The new work, Namak Nazar (white noise) explores the sonic qualities of salt through field recordings from salt pans and percussive salt-based instruments developed by the artists. A video work documents the current-day locations of the Great Salt Hedge as the artists look for evidence in the landscape, though little is found beyond the ruins of one of the fortified lookouts.

Photographs, including one of that lookout, punctuate the staircase ascent and descent, images created through a Victorian salt printing process and a mixture of images from the Sambhar Salt Lake, the discovered lookout ruins, and AI-processed recreations of the hedge developed in lieu of any evidence remaining in the landscape. Some of these images were created alongside a film footage which now forms a moving image installation to open at Tate Britain later in the month, a work considering the hedge as an infrastructure of colonial violence but also one of resistance, ecology, and decolonisation.





What began as a speculative studio visit by Dr Cliff Lauson – who has overseen this exhibition alongside the curator Kinnari Saralya – has opened up vast research and creative possibilities for Hylozoic/Desires that will likely grow further. Research that began with a Graham Foundation grant has not only developed into these Somerset House and Tate Britain projects, but is also incorporated in the duo’s recent presentation at India Art Fair and in the ongoing Sharjah Biennial 16, and no doubt will reach far further over years to come.

The way in which Hylozoic/Desires interrogate such divisive, violent, and enormous colonial infrastructure is rich not only in research and curiosity, but also in poetry and play. In doing so it brings forth evidence and intersections with academic knowledge, but also an ever-expanding number of ways to explore the salt, landscape, ecology, politics, and materials of the Great Salt Hedge. Locating it in the courtyard and very suite of rooms of Somerset House where the economic benefits of the barrier to Britain were managed, now folds architecture into that mix of ingredients.