I arrived at Tate Britain’s imposing neo-classical Duveen Galleries as the warm honey hue of soft evening light swathed across its high vaulted ceilings and ionic columns. The audience for The Salt March lined up along both sides of the hallway, where rubble sacks filled with glistening white and coral minerals were dotted across the tawny marble floor, seemingly about to topple over. These slumping stacks embodied a living monument to salt, a crystallised form of life.
The performance was devised by artistic duo Hylozoic/Desires (artist and writer Himali Singh Soin and composer and performance artist David Soin Tappeser) on the occasion of their Art Now commission, The Hedge of Halomancy 2025. Art Now is an exhibition platform within Tate Britain showcasing emerging artists, yet Hylozoic/Desire’s immense and tentacular project could not be contained within one site, instead shapeshifting across multiple artistic forms including film, textile, sculpture, AI renderings and archival interventions, and staged across multiple geographies including Sharjah Art Foundation, Tate Britain and Somerset House.
The Hedge of Halomancy attempts to excavate traces of the ‘Great Hedge of India’, or Inland Customs Line, an unwieldy botanical structure erected by the British East India Company in the 1800s to control the movement of salt. Over 4,000km long and stretching from the Indus River to the Bay of Bengal, the hedge was an impenetrable barrier composed of robust indigenous shrubs (jujubes, acacias, prickly pears). Despite cleaving the subcontinent in two, there are no surviving visual traces of its existence.
The duo has woven a fabulation based on textural descriptions of the hedge, declaring it ‘both an infrastructure of extraction and a seed for resistance’.1 Tate curators Dominique Heyse-Moore and Nathan Ladd frame the commission as ‘a story told through holes’.2 It is here, within the perforations and fissures of impassable colonial structures, that The Salt March sits – a performance envisioned as invoking resistance and joy, while reflecting on the legacies and entanglements of the Empire and its colonies.3
These entanglements were revealed almost instantly as a trumpet player dressed in scarlet military garb emerged unassumingly from a closed corridor, softly playing a long single note. One by one, their bandmates arrived, each timidly perambulating the circumference of the marble columns – a choreographed movement that traced out this enmeshing of colonial legacies with the present moment. The ceremonial fantail hat worn by the trombonist reminded me of those donned by Wagah border patrolmen during their daily performances of the border between India and Pakistan.
There was an uncanniness to the music played by the quartet. Their inaugural harmony was not the triumphant blast usually associated with military bands; rather, it presented an otherworldly dissonance. Together, they announce the arrival of Mayalee (played by Singh Soin), a character dressed in an iridescent, voluminous Victorian ball gown constructed from ridged recycled blue and silver plastics. It was unclear whether the performers all occupied the same spatio-temporal realm; Singh Soin’s costume appeared futuristic, while the band’s uniform was reminiscent of the colonial era.
The performance was replete in rich, multi-sensual textures that visually, haptically and sonically disrupted the Duveens. Mayalee glided forwards and rays of light caught the silver threads of her dress as she effortlessly poured salt into thick shimmering lines that caressed the dark marble floor. Sharp, jingling percussive noises pierced the minimalist musical composition as the quartet began to move forwards with ghungroos (anklets made from metallic bells) wrapped around their ankles. Reverberating through the airy Duveens, this haunting soundscape constellated across the flowing flecks of salt and the brassy timbres of the marching band.
This immersive experience of sensory resistance was further accentuated as the rhythmic ‘chum chum’ of the ghungroos evoked Mayalee’s origin story: a nineteenth-century tawaif (courtesan) whom Hylozoic/Desires drew out from the margins of the Company’s accounts book and heralded for her auspicious charm.4 She was primarily paid in salt, a choice she fervently insisted upon during a time in which the British maintained an oppressive monopoly over its trade.
I watched Mayalee hypnotically trace trails of salt with her hands, maybe mapping her own coded cartographies. Perhaps she was punching holes through the ghostly traces of the hedge itself. Scholar Katherine Schofield reflects on the divine forces embodied by the historic Mayalee, questioning whether it was ‘Mayalee as woman or Mayalee as goddess who wielded such power in defence of her salt that not even the colonial juggernaut could deny her?’5
She gathered the salt so freely, defiantly picking up handfuls, recalling another potent historic gesture of resistance. In 1930, during the Salt Satyagraha, Gandhi led thousands of followers to the coastal town of Dandi. Arriving at his destination, he waded into the ocean to scoop up a fistful of salt. This action sparked a mass campaign of disobedience across the entire subcontinent, marking the collapse of British rule.
This sense of all-encompassing disintegration was echoed by the linearity of the performance shifting as Mayalee began to draw circular motifs into the crystalline piles, while the band’s tight rhythmic composition became disjointed. Faint wails created a permeable spiral of sound as Mayalee began to drowsily stumble towards the staircase, having lost her vitality from casting her divinations. The quartet mirrored her staggered movements; their rhythm dissolved and the dissonance of the sound intensified. Howls filled the vast space, while a jagged run of notes punctuated Mayalee’s descent downstairs.
This dissolution of defined structures, be it the choreography or sound, successfully marked a defining moment of entropy. Witnessing and hearing collapse during the performance, we observe the rebirth of a possible new world. At this moment, I was reminded of the Hylozoic/Desire’s emphasis on the termite within the hedge’s demise, drawing on Rohan Deb Roy’s exploration of the white ant’s contribution to the destruction of colonial physical and bureaucratic infrastructures, from wooden railroads to the paper that made up record books. They also attacked the hedge, acting as decolonial agents, making a once impenetrable structure porous and vulnerable.6 The Salt March invoked a sense of disobedience emerging within organic and alchemical forces that collaborated to render borders porous and redundant.
The band’s flitting scales came to a sudden halt to commemorate Mayalee’s disappearance. The pause filled the entire vertical expanse of the rotunda. The tuba player made their way to a higher balcony and blew air down the instrument so that only the sound of breath, or life itself, held the audience’s attention and initiated a brief, yet significant, pause that allowed us to feel each other’s presence in space. Death, or perhaps the hedge’s decomposition, was marked by the solo trumpeter, who briefly played a solemn funereal call that reverberated across the swirling architecture of the rotunda. This was immediately followed by an unconventional call-and-response between the band members – performers repeated their bandmate’s phrases by singing directly into their instrument.
The transformation was complete as Mayalee began her ascent, this time with braids of sweet water pearls dangling across her eyes. When describing this headdress, the artists say ‘it is unclear whether this is to commune better with the dead, to hone her powers of listening or to adapt to changing climate. Is she walking into the future, or to her own execution?’7 The musicians continued their process of deconstructing sound as the trombonist took apart their instrument so all that remained was a mouthpiece. This entropic act reminded me of multidisciplinary artist Korokrit Arunanondchai’s assertion that ‘ghosts are decomposers: how they digest ancestral memories, trauma, things that seem like they can’t be processed in one person’s lifetime’.8
The re-introduction of Mayalee as a possible spectral presence, alongside the unified shimmering of the band’s resounding ghungroos, beautifully motioned towards the regenerative impact of the termites, whose destructive impact made space for new life to exist within the dissolving hedges. The musicians moved buoyantly towards the galleries that were awash in an electrifying cobalt blue. Now they had trailing objects attached to their waists, such as brooms, long branches and outstretched jute, which flattened and dispersed the boundaries and patterns that Mayalee previously traced. Their amended uniforms and liberated movements recalled the civil unrest that followed after Gandhi’s Salt March. As writers Mark and Paul Engler note, ‘in the procession’s wake, hundreds of Indians who served in local administrative posts for the imperial government resigned their positions’.9 The audience, too, became an active participant in this erosion as we ambled behind the band, ecstatically crunching into the salt. At the front, Mayalee led the march, twirling and swaying her hips. Together we had participated in this political theatre, where old structures fell apart under our weight.10
The Salt March enabled a resounding moment of collective joy as the riotous expression of the marching band soared to a euphoric climax. One by one, each performer walked backstage, their sound reducing to a whisper. Mayalee looked back at us, her followers, before drifting off stage. She evaporated, leaving behind tracks of salt crystals scattered across the gallery floor. I looked at the once pristine marble halls, now encrusted in salt, with emptied bags strewn everywhere and faded footprints glinting under the mesmerising blue light. While The Salt March continuously referenced the crumbling of colonial infrastructure, it deftly moved beyond institutional critique and, like the termite, burrowed into the crevices of the physical framework it targeted. By fully embracing the multi-dimensional textures evoked by salt and brass, Hylozoic/Desires successfully unearthed the vulnerability inherent in all nation-building materials. The salt crystals will forever remain fugitive between the gaps in the marble tiles, continuing to erode seemingly monumental, impermeable structures. What traces of the future will they leave behind?
This event was organised by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational in partnership with Hyundai Motor