NAMAK NAZAR

“Prophets heal the desert with it and those who look back to receive the gaze of the other are turned into pillars of it. It is disobedient.”

Namak Nazar is an aural sculpture that tells the story of an etheric element: ‘So’, a particle of salt that spells the doom of climate change and offers redemption by looking inward. Its palindromic gaze, its evil eye. 

Taking the form of a pillar of salt, wedged between the underworld and the realms above, with trumpet speakers that emerge from it like desert blossoms, Namak Nazar reflects on salt lines: markers of a world that is becoming increasingly saline as its waters evaporate. 

The poetry combines science and myth to evoke salts’ sensual materiality, and tells its story, as a starter of revolutions to a container for nuclear waste. The soundscape comprises percussion instruments made with salt and songs recorded in the Rann of Kutch, the desert on the border of India and Pakistan. Just as the utility pole is used to communicate messages over long distances, Namak Nazar sends signals that transmit between deserts, pointing at the dying fish at the Salton Sea, and becomes a carrier of prayer, warding off evil, connecting the past to the future, the sea to the desert, the south to the north. 

Such poles, harbingers of techno-accelerationism, are erected across our landscapes. Like salt, their doing is their undoing: they preserve, and they corrode. What is the threat, and what sustains us? The outer and the inner blur, the periphery and the center dissolve. 

Quiet your mind, let salt wash over you to listen to Namak Nazar, it is listening to you too.

Namak Nazar, DesertX, California, 2023

THE HEDGE OF HALOMANCY

The Hedge of Halomancy, 2025. 4K video, full colour, stereo sound, 23 mins. Co-commissioned by Sharjah Biennale 16 + Tate Britain.

The Hedge of Halomancy is a moving image installation that excavates the lost archive of the Inland Customs Line, an immense barrier of plants that the British Empire grew across the Indian subcontinent in the mid-19th century to prevent the smuggling of salt. 

The video work considers this ‘hedge’ a poetic and political space; a partition that begets a series of divisions and perforations that continue to fray, tear and rip into our present. The hedge is both: a border infrastructure of slow violence and a garden of resistance. 

Alongside archival records, which retrace the historical legacy of the line, the work employs fictional interludes to tell the story of Mayalee, a courtesan who defies the Empire’s attempts to cut off her traditional salt stipends, which she uses to conduct rituals of halomancy (salt divinations). One of her prophecies reaches A.O. Hume, British commissioner of the hedge, and changes the course of history. 

Burnt down in the 1857 uprising, eaten by termites and infested by field rats, the hedge resists subjugation. It becomes a porous membrane in which the material and the spiritual become interpenetrable.

SALT PRINTS

At its greatest, The Inland Customs Line was 4000 kilometres long and employed 12,911 guards and gardeners. It stretched in a singularly indirect line from the Indus to where the Madras and Bengal boundaries meet. It was presumably neither beautiful nor picturesque, and antiquaries had hardly begun to photograph when it was abolished in 1878. – H.F. Pelham, F Haverfield, 1846-1919

This series forms a new, speculative archive. As Hylozoic/Desires conducted their research, they uncovered textual descriptions of the hedge, but no visual evidence. Using the archives as prompts, they began generating imagery to return this history to our collective sources. Some images originate from the fictional universe of the video work, shot at Sambhar Lake, an important British outpost for the collection of salt; others are generated using AI image generators. By not specifying the distinction between re-enactments and artificial generations, the artists question the role of truth, the responsibility of the archive and the disappearance of knowledge that no longer serves those in power.  

The images are converted into salt prints, a method of photographic development used in the Victorian era, before salt was replaced with albumen. The prints are then toned with pure gold, bringing salt’s value to the fore. 

NAMAK HARAM/NAMAK HALAL

Unfolding in three chapters across Somerset House, Salt Line, Salt Office and Salt Stair, the project invokes the spectral presence of the so-called Great Salt Hedge, today largely erased from memory and the landscape. 

In Somerset House’s courtyard, namak halal/namak haram (2025) traces the path of this disruptive barrier which ran from the Gulf of Bengal to the Indus River. The terms ‘namak halal’ (in accordance with salt) signifying loyalty and ‘namak haram’ (against the salt) signifying betrayal, highlight the hedge's dual nature as both a tax barrier and a site of resistance against colonial occupation. 

The installation features organic cotton fabric, fixed with salt then hand block-printed in India with vegetable dyes derived from the original plants and insects of the hedge. One side showcases colonial botanical drawings in a classified format, while the other is a swarm of stamps of a historical emblem in which the lion, symbolizing the British Empire, has now been replaced with a termite and the phrase ‘Salt Issued’ from a historical salt tax receipt. While the line of fabric becomes an impassable obstruction, whispers, ideas, shadows, prophecies find their way through. 

The exhibition continues in the South Wing, spanning the Salt Office and Salt Stair of Somerset House, unravelling the histories of the Inland Customs Line through archival materials, speculative imagery, an immersive sound piece, and a video documenting the artists’ journey to trace the hedge’s ghostly remnants today.

MOKSHAPAT (Snakes and Ladders)

Mokshapat, meaning pPath to lLiberation, is an tapestry embroidery on Mashru, a double dexterous weave of pure silk on one side and pure cotton on the other. Mashru was invented as a trick, so muslimsMuslims could continue to wear the gleam of silk without disobeying the Quran, which forbids silk from touching skin. The material now comes to symbolise a unity between Hindu and Muslim weavers, a friendship forgotten in the recent decades of communal violencesviolence. The word Mashru means ‘“permitted’” ( from mashry in Arabic) and “‘mixture’” (from misry in Sanskrit). The tapestry textile thus undermines the partitiondivisions createdbreaded by the salt hedge, which was colloquially called the ‘permit line’. Instead, it insists on  the sameness in difference. 

The tapestrytextile, while referring to the film about the hedge, the smugglers that climbed it and the courtesan’s haveli (wall) with three holes, is a boundary, a membrane, a unity of duality. It is loosely based on the board game, Mokshapat, brought to England from India in 1890 and, rechristened renamed ‘snakes and ladders’.  The original game was used as a divination tool with dice, charting the different paths towards enlightenment (or entrapment in eternal cycles of rebirth). The British adapted these Indian philosophies to Victorian morals quotients. The tapestry textile upturns the idea of liberation as based on karma or chance. Rather, its divergent paths and multiplicities suggest that freedom may be a virtue that is not granted by another, but is found within.

When we see ourselves in the enemy, the snake might help us off the ladder.    

I and Thou

Print on aluminium.150 cm x112 cm

Piscean Premonition is inspired by the masses of dead fish washed up on riverbanks and shorelines globally, almost monthly. Unable to pinpoint the cause, scientists explain these fatal events as “climate-related,” calling them portents of things to come. But what happens when the final fish floats belly-up? How will these creatures be remembered? Who will tell the story of their life, and eventual demise?

The artist envisions the cause to be salt, as fish are being found encrusted in salt on the saline shores of Great Salt Lake. You are invited to imagine yourself as a future human, discovering in this ruin an extinct aquatic species from a long-forgotten era of earth’s balance-turned-turbulence. Contained within this salt-brick structure, embedded among the preserved fish, is a story of how we once lived and the world that once was.

Fish often appear in myths and legends as symbols of fortune-telling. Here, they become prophets of a precarious planetary moment—our current moment. Experiencing this imagined future can inform our present; retelling histories can manifest a different future. 

Reflecting on climate change through the prism of salt, Piscean Premonition evokes the different histories of Utah and the Southwest: of a time when it was an inland sea, of an ocean that has carried the traumas of so many bodies, of the healing potential of rebirth, afterlives, and the imperative to be good ancestors. 

While this ruin conjures a plausible future, it also references possibilities within the here-and-now. The fish, fired in a salt kiln and glazed with salt from toxic water bodies, are cast from molds made from real tilapia. These ubiquitous fish are among the most salt-tolerant species and thus present a food source for a saline future. Salt bricks, likewise, represent an alternative to carbon-rich cement. Created with elements of earth and salt, this piece is infused with material ideas to meet the warnings it issues.