On Aug. 29, “The Hedge of Halomancy,” a multimedia exhibition, opened to the public at the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Jr. Athenaeum.
The international artistic pair known as Hylozoic/Desires, Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser, created the exhibition as both a expressive and archival effort over the relatively understudied Great Salt Hedge of India.
A border grown by the British Empire spanning 1,500 miles, the hedge wall divided India by taxing salt at rates up to 2,500%. Despite the necessity of salt for all facets of life, like preservation of food, the duo realized few had understood the hedge wall’s significance.
“What really blew our mind is that it was [one of] the biggest colonial infrastructure projects, but nobody knew about it,” Tappeser said. “Nobody knew about it in India — the UK — and so for us it was such a metaphorical thing: this borderline that really governed people’s everyday lives.”
In its 23-minute runtime, two characters and a hint of magic thread a story through the shrubbery. Mayalee, played by Soin, is the work’s protagonist and a defiant courtesan who uses halomancy — salt divination — to cast prophesies.
One of those spells reaches Allan Octavian Hume, a botanist and the British commissioner responsible for the hedge itself. Hume, similar to his real-world counterpart, comes to doubt his role in the wall’s violence.
“He is very fascinating,” Tappeser said. “As he built it, he became more critical of colonial rule. He saw all the violence that was inflicted by this and had his doubts, asking, ‘is it really the kind of civilizing effort we as the British pretend to be doing here in India, is it something completely different?’”
The sheer scale of the hedge is difficult to grasp with the human mind. Since no photographs were taken of the hedge, the exhibition tries to demonstrate its size with a combination of real-world documents, panoramas and rendered landscapes.
“It’s the distance between Dallas and Boston,” Tappeser said. “12 feet high and six feet thick, all continuously growing with a customs checkpoint every mile with a kind of bramble: thorny trees and bushes. It was enormous.”
Fees extracted by the British were exorbitant as well. A daily laborer would need to spend two months every year just to provide salt for their family, Tappeser said. The result was widespread cholera and the ruining of the immune systems for countless individuals living on the subcontinent.
It was the biggest colonial infrastructure project before the building of rail
— David Soin Tappeser, multimedia artist
Located in the Athenaeum’s multimedia installation room, the exhibition projects across three walls with 4K video. Overhead speakers bounce between magical concerts of bansuri, an Indian flute, and sitar, a stringed instrument played by courtesans, to stern responses by percussion and tuba.
The two soundscapes mirror those of the colonial effort and resistance front in India during the time period depicted.
“When the British came, a lot of royal patronage fell away,” Tappeser said. “Actually, one of the first things the British did when they came and took over territory, is to go through the account books and slash any funding for the arts — something we’re quite familiar with all over the world.
After holding a grasp on the region for decades, the barrier vanished from both the landscape and from public memory. By displaying the work, the artistic duo hopes to reinsert the hedge’s lost narrative back into the archives.
For students, the work offers a powerful visage of triumph over barriers: that perhaps the structures we erect are just as magically fictional as the salt spells cast in the exhibition.
The exhibition will remain on display until February 2027. The Crow Museum at UTD is free to visitors and open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
“It was so present for the better half of a century and then suddenly disappeared,” Tappeser said. “It reminds us that some of these borders and walls and divisions that we think are permanent are ultimately fictional. They can disappear from our memory within a generation.”